


Work In Progress

by erelis



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: AIs, Background Relationships, Freelancers - Freeform, M/M, Project Freelancer, sims
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2020-08-14 14:13:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 35,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20193583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erelis/pseuds/erelis
Summary: Project Freelancer—one of the UNSC's answers to the prohibitive costs of the SPARTAN program and David's last hope of having a military career. And for a little while, life is good. Until it all falls apart and everything he has is taken from him.The man who leaves Sidewinder won't be the same one who walked onto theMother of Invention. But having nothing left to lose means that he has everything to gain. If he's willing to fight for it.And if there's one thing the Project taught him, it's to never back down from a fight.





	1. Chapter 1

As far as first days went, it wasn’t terrible. Not yet. But it also wasn’t shaping up to be the best. He’d shown up promptly at 0800 as he’d been instructed, all of his worldly possessions stuffed into a standard-issue duffle bag, determined to make good on the second chance he was being offered. Regardless of what his official record said, he _was_ reliable. He was a good soldier. A competent one. He knew how to take orders and maintain discipline. He didn’t panic in the middle of a firefight or an ambush. He didn’t lose his nerve at the sight of death or shy away from causing it. He was quick witted, determined, loyal, and he meant to make the Director see that.

Then the shuttle had departed and all of his careful planning had gone to hell.

Right out of the gate, he’d gotten lost trying to navigate the unfamiliar hallways of his new home. It wasn’t his first time aboard a _Charon_-class frigate, but this one wasn’t laid out in the standard configuration. Instead of finding the mess where he was to meet with the Counselor when he turned left out of the hangar bay, he’d ended up in a gallery overlooking some kind of huge training room. A woman in armor had been in there, making some kind of adjustments on a large console. She’d looked up when the door slid open, gave him an unfriendly, narrow-eyed once over, and coldly informed him that he wasn’t authorized to be there. When he’d tried to explain who he was and ask for directions, she’d told him to get the fuck out and threatened to shoot him if he didn’t comply.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings, and it had only gotten worse when he'd finally reached his destination, fifteen minutes late. After being reprimanded for his tardiness, he'd gotten another dressing-down for introducing himself with the wrong damn name, both of which had been delivered in the Counselor's disconcertingly calm, inflectionless voice.

Orientation, such as it was, had passed in a blur of names, security clearances, and protocols. By the end of it, he hadn’t felt any more knowledgeable about the _Mother of Invention_ or what precisely his role in the Project was meant to be than when he’d arrived. It was frustrating, but not entirely surprising. The military had always enjoyed utilizing the sink or swim approach of weeding out undesirables. If he survived these early days, he'd be an asset to the team. If he sank, oh well, valuable time and resources wouldn't have been wasted on training him.

He hadn’t liked that kind of treatment back when he’d been a grunt and he sure as hell hadn’t appreciated it now, but he hadn’t managed to get onto the deck of a ship that technically didn’t exist by giving up when things got difficult. Not only that, he’d been through enough shit and met enough assholes who looked at soldiers and saw numbers instead of people to recognize when someone higher up the chain of command thought he was going to fail a bullshit test. So he’d damn well succeed now, not just for the sake of his career but also out of pure, unadulterated spite. He’d show them all—the Counselor, the Director, the unpleasant woman from earlier who’d acted like he didn’t belong there—that he had a place in the Project and on this team. He’d joined the UNSC to protect humanity from the Covenant threat, to help win the war and drive the bastards back to whatever area of space they’d all come from. If this was his best chance of doing it, then he had every intention of being the best damn Freelancer he could be.

He was still riding that surge of stubborn conviction when he entered the locker room to stow his belongings. It seemed empty when he walked in, a minor blessing that meant no one was watching him wander up and down the rows of lockers like a lost idiot, scanning the numbers in search of his own. He finally located it in the middle of a row, set the duffle bag on the nearby bench, and tapped the unlock code into the numberpad.

Nothing happened.

Frowning, he did it again, pressing the keys slower this time in case the sensitivity wasn’t calibrated properly. The faint click of the lock releasing still didn’t come. With the first tendrils of nervousness starting to trickle into his gut, he glanced at the door, double-checking that he was at the right locker. It matched the number he’d been told, but just to be safe, he went back over the memory of his orientation: the Counselor sitting on the other side of the metal table, sliding across a set of dog tags and carefully enunciating the relevant personnel information, expecting him to memorize it all.

He hadn’t misheard him. This was the right locker. It was the correct combination. Either he was being defeated by the simplest numeric locking system in the UNSC or the pad was defective. He _knew_ it was latter, but he could just imagine the humiliation of slinking out of there in defeat and having to ask someone to help him. In his mind’s eye, he could see the Counselor scribbling down more of those notes on his irritatingly ever-present notepad, judging him like it was his fucking fault the locker wouldn’t open.

Already, he knew the intense scrutiny was going to bother him. And it would be intense, if the fact that there was a leaderboard in the middle of the locker room was any indication. Apparently they were being watched, judged, and ranked and he was too new to know what the criteria were. If there even were any. For all he knew, everything he said and did was going to be analyzed.

Of its own volition, his hand curled into a fist. It would be easy enough to hit the numberpad, see if that would jar the potentially shorted connection back into working order. He probably would have done it too, if his intake interview—was it really only two days ago?—hadn’t still been fresh in his mind. They already thought he was a violent, temperamental loose cannon. Taking out his frustration on a locker on his first day wasn’t going to help erase that impression.

“Hit it.”

The low, raspy voice startled him so badly that he flinched and spun around. Sitting behind him on the bench across the aisle was probably the most intimidating man he’d ever seen. No small feat, considering the type of men he’d served with. The guy was huge, obvious even with his true height distorted by his hunched position, and muscular. _Very_ muscular. The faded grey t-shirt he wore clung to his broad chest and massively muscled arms, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination and looking like it was struggling not to tear under the strain. Thin scars covered his hands and forearms; long dark slashes on rich brown skin, like he’d been in a multitude of knife fights without proper protection. His head was shaved smooth and the absence of hair drew attention to the rest of his features: high cheekbones, strong nose, full lips.

Not just intimidating. Attractive, too. _Really_ attractive.

Eyes so dark they were nearly black were watching him, but aside from the faintest hint of a lift to one scarred, hard-angled eyebrow, whatever the guy was thinking wasn’t clear in his otherwise flat expression.

“What?” he asked dumbly, the word slipping out of his mouth before he could stop it and reconsider if that was really the first impression he wanted to make: the inept idiot who couldn’t get his locker open or follow directions.

But the guy had appeared out of nowhere! _How the hell could someone that big move that quietly?_ He hadn’t heard him come in or sit down. He wouldn’t have even known he was there if he hadn’t said something. In the already tense atmosphere, it was a little unnerving.

The guy didn’t say anything else, just jerked his chin—faintly dusted with stubble—toward the uncooperative locker. Finally taking the hint, he closed his hand into a fist again and banged it lightly against the metal panel, right next to the numberpad. The thing beeped, briefly illuminating the keys, and the lock opened with an unexpectedly loud metallic click.

Exhaling an unconsciously held breath, he glanced over his shoulder and said sheepishly, “Thanks.”

The guy shrugged, the simple motion creating a rather hypnotic ripple of flexing muscle, and leaned forward to lace up one of his boots. And thank fuck for that, since the Project’s newest recruit was standing there staring at him like a slack-jawed moron.

Clearing his throat, he turned back to his locker and pulled it open. He knew that the best thing to do was let the guy alone and go about his own business. After all, he’d come in to drop off his stuff, not ogle his teammates. Yet the silence seemed thick and oppressive and despite knowing what he _ought_ to do, he was also new. He wanted to get to know his teammates, and if this guy wasn’t a Freelancer, he didn’t know what a Freelancer actually was.

“So, um,” he started, wincing internally at how decidedly not confident he sounded. “I’m the new guy. I guess you could tell.” Glancing over his shoulder, he gave him a lopsided smile.

For his part, the big guy didn’t smile back. He didn’t even respond at first, only looking up from his boots after he’d finished lacing the second. And even then, he just looked at him, expression still blank and wholly unimpressed.

_Shut up and let him alone_ , he told himself firmly. _He doesn’t want to talk to you. Put your shit away and stop annoying the guy._ Wise advice if he’d only take it.

He didn’t fucking take it.

“I’m D—” He caught himself before he could make the same mistake twice. _Codenames. Use your codename. David doesn’t exist anymore. _“Washington. Uh, Agent Washington. Wash, I guess. Washington’s kind of a mouthful.”

It didn’t roll as easily off his tongue as his real name did. It sounded clumsy and foolish, like he was a kid playing pretend or one of those old Earth entertainers trying to make a statement by only using one name. A little pretentious and a lot dishonest. He wasn’t against lying, per se, but he preferred to tell the truth. It was simple. He liked simple. And it was a hell of a lot easier not to get into a mess of shit by trying to keep a bunch of convoluted lies straight.

But _David_ was dead, written out of history with a little white lie: a date, a location, and a KIA on his record. His family had been notified, his surviving sisters informed that their beloved brother died in some glorious battle against the alien scourge. No mentions of his tarnished record or the possibility of dishonorable discharge. Whatever difficulties he faced now, at least the Project had given him that: something for his family to be proud of when they remembered him, instead of disappointed and ashamed.

He had to get used to Washington. To saying it. To _being_ what the name was meant to represent. It was all he had left. That and a meager supply of personal effects.

The silence lengthened.

Disappointed that he’d managed to make yet another poor impression on someone he was going to have to work with, Wash turned back to the locker to get on with it. He tugged open the strap holding the duffle bag closed, unfolded the top, and set about emptying his things into the locker. There really wasn’t much: a jacket, a couple of photographs of his—now his younger sister’s—cats that he pinned in place against the back with some generic circular-shaped magnets, a couple t-shirts and pairs of track pants, underwear and socks, a standard issue toiletry kit, and an old pair of sneakers.

He’d been told that there was a commissary onboard that he could visit to acquire whatever other necessities he might need and he wasn’t hurting for money. He had more than enough credits in his account from his old UNSC corporal’s pay and Project Freelancer paid even better. Once he got settled here, he figured he’d go and get some other things, maybe fill up the locker so it wouldn’t look as destitute and pathetic as it did now that he was finished transferring everything he owned into it.

Wash eyed the locker as he folded up the duffle bag and shoved it into the bottom, uncomfortably aware of how it looked like it belonged to a man with nothing: no family, no friends, no possessions. It didn’t really matter. He wasn’t there to make friends. He was there to help save the galaxy and, realistically speaking, probably die in the process. But he’d given up most of what he had to be a part of this and lost the rest to war; until some Covenant bastard cut him down, he wouldn’t have minded having at least _one_ friend to make what was left of his life marginally more pleasant.

Dragging himself out of his quickly darkening thoughts, Wash shut the door, turned away, and nearly jumped out of his skin _again_. The big guy was still sitting there, watching him. It was a little embarrassing, realizing that some stranger had just watched him empty his life out of a bag and haphazardly arrange it into a space not even a whole square meter, but he squashed the embarrassment before it had a chance to manifest as a flush across his face.

They were both Freelancers. This guy probably didn’t have much more than he did. Getting all red and blotchy over it would just make the guy think he was a bigger idiot than he probably already thought he was.

Trying to play it cool, Wash nodded politely at him and took a step toward the door.

“Maine,” came a gruff mutter.

Ordinarily, it might not have made much sense without more context, but here, it didn’t take a genius to realize what the word meant. Eyebrows rising with surprise at the unexpected offer, Wash turned back to him and grinned, feeling a little of the knotted tension in his gut easing. Maybe the guy didn’t dislike him as much as he’d thought. “East coast, huh?”

Maine didn’t respond verbally, just gave another one of those rolling shrugs that was entirely too fascinating to watch. This time, after a generous application of willpower—and the paranoid fear that the man would take offense to the undeniably appreciative nature of the attention—Wash managed not to stare. And it occurred to him then that perhaps Maine just wasn’t a very talkative guy. He hadn’t cursed at him or ignored him or threatened him the way the woman had. He hadn’t gotten up and walked out without a word while Wash had been busy like he’d assumed he would. He’d stayed there, clearly not doing anything productive despite probably having a dozen pressing things to do, and watched him.

_No_ , Wash thought suddenly. _Not watching_ . _ Staying. Hanging out with the new guy._ Silently offering companionship without making a big deal out of it. If he’d annoyed him, Maine probably would have left. He didn’t look like the sort of person who put up with anybody’s shit.

Maybe he was making something out of nothing, seeing meaning in a random act that wasn’t there. But Maine wasn’t correcting him and Wash didn’t want to be any more pessimistic about his start in Project Freelancer than he’d already been.

“It’s nice to meet you, Maine,” Wash said sincerely, smiling a tiny bit wider. “You’re the first friendly face I’ve seen around here.”

_That_ got a reaction. Admittedly, it wasn’t much. Maine blinked. Just blinked, nothing more, and looked at him. But it seemed like he’d caught him off-guard with that remark. He even thought he saw a glimmer of surprise in Maine’s eyes, though it was equally likely that it was only a figment of his imagination.

Then again, maybe he _was_ surprised. As big and foreboding as he looked, maybe Maine didn’t have many friends. Maybe people took one look at him and tried to get as far away from him as possible. It wasn’t difficult to imagine, even if Wash didn’t feel the same way. Just because he _looked_ like he could rip someone apart with his bare hands didn’t mean that he actually _did_ it on a regular basis.

“Are you busy?” Wash found himself asking, curious to see how far Maine’s apparent tolerance extended. “It’s okay if you are. Just tell me to fuck off. But if you’re not, could you show me where our bunks are?” Huffing softly, he raked his fingers up through the short hair at the back of his head. “I got kind of turned around when I arrived and my sense of direction’s still shot.”

Maine said nothing, his face devoid of anything resembling acceptance or rejection. In the spirit of optimism, Wash chose to interpret that neutrality as a question.

“I’ve been on ships like this before,” he explained, not wanting to appear green and clueless. “But this one’s not laid out like the rest.”

After a few seconds of silence, Maine rose to his feet. Wash was tall—six foot two inches—and as fit as an ODST, but this guy dwarfed him in all respects. Probably close to seven feet, if not seven even, and somehow even more muscular than he’d appeared while seated, Maine standing up made the relatively large locker room feel small and cramped. But Wash didn’t step away from him and the topsy-turvy twisting sensation in his stomach sure as hell had nothing to do with nervousness.

_Impressed_ , he told himself firmly, as he tipped his head back a little so he could meet Maine’s eyes. _I’m impressed by the size of him. That’s all. Impressed. _

Christ, he hoped it wasn’t obvious that he thought the guy was hot as fuck.

Maine studied him for a moment, almost as if he was giving him time to rescind the request, then jerked his head toward the door and started walking. Knowing that this time he was definitely interpreting his response correctly, Wash trailed after him, waiting until they were through the door and into the corridor before stepping up beside him.

They walked along in surprisingly companionable silence. Maine didn’t point out areas of interest or indicate where each turn of the corridor led, but Wash thought it was a tour nonetheless. The ship was big, but it wasn’t _that_ big, and it took an oddly long time to reach the area designated for the Freelancers’ quarters. Especially since Wash had the sneaking suspicion that the locker room was only about twenty meters away.

It really wasn’t the _best_ first day. But all in all, he thought, as Maine opened the door and gestured him inside, it wasn’t the absolute worst, either.

* * *

The kick caught him square in the chest, the force of it driving the air from his lungs and sending him flying backward. He tried unsuccessfully to regain his balance, but a right hook caught him in the jaw, snapping his head back and undoing all of his desperate scrambling to find his footing. Already tipping beyond his ability to right himself, he fell all the harder when his feet were mercilessly swept out from beneath him. The impact with the deck seized up his lungs again; instead of struggling to stay in the game, he let his head drop onto the metal floor with a weak, breathless groan.

Maine’s foot came down on his throat before he could get his hands halfway lifted in surrender. Even through the protective layers of his armor, he could feel the pressure the other man was exerting, causing his mind to produce an alarming vision of the whole thing crumpling like a tin can and snapping his neck.

“You’re moving too slow,” another man’s voice called. It was dimly familiar, but from this angle and with Maine’s foot preventing him from turning his head, Wash couldn’t see who it was. “You gotta be faster. Maine, let him up.”

Maine responded immediately, lifting his foot and stepping back out of the way. Wash planted his hands against the deck and pushed up into a sitting position, ignoring the faint ache in his chest. Nothing was broken. Maine had pulled the kick and the armor had done its job, but Wash thought it'd be more surprising if there wasn't a bruise than if there was. The guy hit like a runaway Warthog.

Heaving himself to his feet, Wash glanced beyond Maine’s shoulder to the man standing some distance away. Also armored—everyone was when they took the floor of the training room—though his was gold in contrast to Wash’s grey and Maine’s white. _Agent New York_, he remembered.

"Sorry," he called, shaking out his arms. "I'm not used to fighting in this much armor."

New York chuckled. "You were a marine, right? They don't equip you properly anymore?"

"Yeah, course they do." Wash gestured toward himself. "Just isn't all of this."

A few meters away, Maine glanced over at New York. Neither man said anything, but Wash had a feeling there was some kind of communication going on there that he wasn't privy to understanding. That assumption was confirmed a second later when he saw Maine twitch one of his shoulders and New York nodded.

"You're expecting it to be heavier than it is, aren't you?" he said, coming forward as Maine stepped back to the perimeter of the room.

Wash hadn't been consciously thinking of it that way, but now that it had been put into so many words, he realized that New York was right. It was a lot of armor, more than the standard equipment he’d gotten accustomed to wearing since his enlistment, and this was his first test run in the suit the Director had chosen for him. At a glance, it looked heavy and unwieldy, too restrictive for the kind of speed and flexibility he was used to employing in combat.

Except it wasn't.

He’d been wearing it for about an hour and a half and he had yet to experience any problems with it. He wasn’t getting too hot from all the layers or exhausted from bearing its weight. In fact, it really wasn’t any heavier than anything he’d worn on the front. Wasn't harder to move around in, either. But it was so counterintuitive that his brain was still struggling to reconcile his expectations with reality. Consequently, his maneuverability sucked.

Wordlessly, he nodded his agreement. If they were in regular clothes, he had a feeling that he wouldn’t be making such an embarrassment of himself. Contrary to the number of times Maine had had him on his back already today, he was pretty skilled at hand-to-hand.

“Happened to all of us,” New York said easily, his tone understanding and maybe a little amused. “You’ll get used to it. And once you do, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.”

It was only his third day with the Project. He'd been introduced to a number of the other Freelancers, though he hadn't spent enough time with any of them to really take their measure. So far, New York was proving to be the most personable. He seemed pretty chatty, at least in comparison to the rest of the people Wash had met, and relatively friendly. Nothing like South Dakota, the woman who'd snapped at him on his first day and then hadn't warmed up to him at all upon learning who he was.

Wash exhaled a quiet huff. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“See?" New York laughed. "You’re already learning the ropes. Always listen to York.” He jerked a thumb toward his chest. “He’ll never steer you wrong.”

A snort that could only belong to Maine drifted across the comm channel.

New York clicked his tongue in mock disapproval. “Maine’s never learned that lesson,” he told Wash in a theatrically conspiratorial whisper. “That’s why his ass is always getting into trouble.”

This time, the snort was louder.

“Something tells me he isn’t the only troublemaker here,” Wash replied with a low chuckle.

With an exaggerated gasp, New York clasped his hands to his chest. “Cover’s blown already.” It wasn't necessary to see his face to know he was grinning; Wash could hear it in his voice. “You really are a sharp one. Hey, Maine—”

“_York_,” came a sharp bark over the training room’s PA system. All three of them looked up at the observation window high on the other side of the room, where the silhouette of someone in blue armor was looking down at them. “Are you going to actually use the room or just socialize all day?”

New York lifted a hand in acknowledgement. “Sorry, Carolina,” he drawled, though he didn’t sound particularly sorry or in much of a hurry to get back to training. “Just giving the rookie here some pointers.”

He'd met her yesterday, but Wash hadn't spoken to Carolina since then. His memory offered up an impression of long red hair and vibrant green eyes. _Which Carolina, though?_ _North or South?_ No one had specified during their introduction and he still hadn't heard anything that might provide clarification. At this rate, he was going to have to ask and risk coming off like an idiot.

"Well, wrap it up or get back to work," she continued, obviously unimpressed by his explanation. "Some of us want to use the room too."

Lifting both hands into the air in a brief sign of surrender, New York tilted his head to glance at Wash. “You got a few more rounds left in you?”

On the one hand, he wanted to be done for the day so that he could familiarize himself with the armor on his own, without an audience. But on the other, he’d performed poorly this morning and he wanted to prove—to the others and to himself—that he could do better.

“Yeah,” he said decisively. “Let’s go.”

Nodding, New York looked back up to Carolina. “I’ll give you a call when we’re done, all right?”

"Fine."

Turning away from the observation window, Wash surveyed his opponents. New York was limbering up and Maine hadn't moved from where he was leaning against the far wall.

"Just you and me right now," New York advised, catching the look. "Try not to think about the armor so much and just fight me."

_Easier said than done. _When New York darted forward and swung at him, however, Wash’s first instinct was to dodge out of the way and throw up a hand to block him. Unlike with Maine, who was too strong and too fast to do anything but try not to die, he could actually repel New York. Not very far, the guy was a tenacious and didn't let up, but just enough that Wash was able to hold his own.

As they fell into a flowing rhythm of kicks and punches, Wash began to realize what was happening. The constant motion, the unrelenting shift from offense to defense left him no time to pause, much less start to second-guess what he was doing. He could only act and react, his mind almost meditatively quiet, and as he consistently found his speed and agility unhampered by the thick plates of titanium-alloy, he forgot that he was wearing so much of it.

New York got a sharp right hook past Wash's guard, but as his head snapped to the side, he lashed out with his foot, catching him in the back of the knee and sending him stumbling. It was a fleeting opportunity to gain the upper hand—the slick bastard recovered quickly—but Wash took it. He punched him in the side, between the plates of armor directly into the black undersuit, and New York grunted at the impact. Wash followed it up with another hit to his chest, then grabbed his shoulder and kneed him in the gut. It wasn't the most effective maneuver, his knee impacted with an armor plate instead of soft squishy human parts, but it kept New York distracted long enough to kick his feet out from under him.

It was the first win he'd had since he'd started the training session this morning and as New York's back hit the deck, Wash grinned. "Hey, I guess you were—"

Too busy gearing up for a triumphant, albeit low-level gloat session, Wash never saw it coming. Not until New York had already grabbed his ankle and jerked him off-balance. He just barely managed not to fall on him, and as he was blinking away the slight disorientation, New York twisted around, got on top of him, and pressed his arm across his throat.

"Shouldn't have gotten distracted," he crowed, his sing-song lilt suggesting that he was grinning at him.

"All right!" Wash conceded, lifting his hands in surrender. "You got me."

"Sure did." Settling back, he took his weight off his arm. "You did better, though." He patted Wash's chest in consolatory encouragement, then rose to his feet and held out his hand. "You weren't overthinking it so much this time, were you?"

"No," Wash said, grasping his hand and letting New York help haul him to his feet. "That helped." He didn't bother specifying what _that_ meant, figuring that he'd understand. And probably appreciate the subtlety.

From what he could tell, subtlety seemed to be all the rage in Project Freelancer.

New York nodded; in agreement or acknowledgement of the thanks or possibly both, Wash couldn’t tell.

“Missed your chance,” came Maine’s low rumble across the comm.

Wash looked at him. “What do you mean?

Beside him, New York chuckled. “Not everyone’s like you, Maine.”

Wash glanced at him askance, though his attention snapped back to Maine when he nodded at him. “His guard was down. Should’ve taken advantage. Won the round.”

“But it was already over,” Wash pointed out. “New York won.”

He clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Call me York, man. Everybody else does. Besides, it's not like there's an Old York out there to confuse me with."

"Right. York. Sorry."

_York_ shrugged, dismissing the apology. "Nicknames are pretty popular around here. You'll see. Anything else can get garbled real quick during a mission."

Unsurprisingly, Maine had nothing to add. Wash could feel him watching them, but it wasn't until their chatter died down that he said, as if the exchange hadn't happened, "Only one way to win in the field. Kill your enemy. Or be killed."

It was the most Wash had heard him talk since he’d met him. Either he’d been having an antisocial few days or he felt strongly enough about the topic to give loquaciousness a spin. He almost wanted to agree, simply with the hope that being agreeable would encourage Maine to speak up more often. But the part of him that was a veteran of too many devastating battles railed at being thought of as a hapless fool who didn't know how to handle himself in the middle of a fight.

“I’ve been in the field,” Wash said mildly, aiming to strike the right balance between conversational and having a backbone. He really didn’t want Maine to write him off as too argumentative to listen to his advice, but it was just as bad to be seen as a meek pushover. “I know how to kill the enemy.”

Thankfully, it didn’t shut him up. “No hesitation here means no hesitation out there,” Maine explained, with one of those rolling shrugs that wasn’t nearly as impressive covered in armor. “Hesitate here, you might hesitate there.”

York wasn’t saying anything, but after glancing at him, Wash suspected that he was agreeing with him. There was only one option available to him. It would end in an ass-kicking, but his pride wouldn’t let him consider anything else.

“So let’s try it again,” he said, nodding to Maine. “You and me. We go until one of us can’t.”

York made a strange sound that couldn’t seem to decide whether it was trying to be a groan or a chuckle. “It’s your funeral, man.”

Wash shrugged. There was no way in hell he was taking back that challenge. “You gonna stick around and scrape me off the floor? Maybe call into the medbay for me when I’m too unconscious to do it myself?”

Now _that_ sound was a legitimate bark of laughter. “Sure,” York agreed, still laughing, and slapped him on the back. “You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that.”

Guts, pride, a stubborn refusal to know when to give up and call it a day—there were a lot of ways it could be described. Wash didn’t care about that. He didn’t even really care if he ended up in a world of hurt afterward. The important thing was impressing upon his teammates that he wasn't afraid of losing, that he was willing to keep going no matter the odds.

Maine and York traded places, and if it seemed as though York moved as far away from them as possible, Wash figured that it was meant to make his impending beatdown more ominous. Which was completely unnecessary. Watching Maine advance toward him with the stalking steps of inevitable defeat was ominous enough. But this time, instead of saying something or waiting for one of them to officially announce the start of the fight, Wash attacked. After that speech, he figured Maine would appreciate the spontaneity.

Because it certainly didn’t surprise him.

He met Wash’s attack without flinching, blocking that first punch with one hand and grabbing onto the chestplate of his armor with the other. Yanking him off his feet, Maine threw him across the room. _One-fucking-handed. _With an embarrassing yelp of surprise, Wash sailed through the air and crashed down onto the deck a few meters from York’s feet. York didn’t even move. Through the comm, Wash could hear him laughing.

And he could hear the thud of armored boots as Maine came charging after him. Twisting over, Wash pushed himself to his feet, regaining his balance just in time to lunge to the side, narrowly avoiding the crushing blow of Maine’s fist.

After that, there was no time to think. All he could do was try not to get flattened by Maine’s relentless assault of kicks and punches and, in the rare instances when the opportunity presented itself, launch desperate counterattacks. They were always rebuffed with a carelessness that suggested that Maine didn’t view him as a real threat or fear one of his blows connecting. In fact, the one punch Wash managed to land felt like slamming his hand into a concrete barricade—Maine didn’t flinch and even in the protection of the armor, Wash’s hand ached something fierce.

He knew he was going to lose. That’d been a foregone conclusion. But it wasn’t about winning. It was about lasting. It was about taking the bone-jarring hits and getting back up. It was showing Maine that he wasn’t afraid and that even if he couldn’t win, he was going to make him work for every second of his victory before he went down.

And he did go down. It took less time than it had with York, but he did a lot better than he had during his first go-round with Maine. That was something. Whether anyone else thought it meant anything, it did to Wash.

Maine caught him in the side of the head with a fist, rattling him, and followed it up with a nasty kick to the gut. It stunned him, made his breath explode out of his lungs so fast that his chest burned, and when another punch slammed into his chest, he crumpled like an empty can. Wash hit the ground in a ball, which dampened the impact a little when Maine kicked him over onto his back and planted his foot on his throat again.

Letting his hands fall limply to his sides, Wash opened them in surrender. Maine stared down at him for a few seconds, saying nothing, the pressure of his foot subtly increasing, then stepped off of him and moved away. Wash stayed where he was, staring up at the ceiling and trying to coax his body into taking some much needed gulps of air. York appeared in his periphery, hands on his hips.

“You dead yet, rookie?”

“Maybe,” Wash wheezed. Maybe he ought to have been embarrassed by that, but he wasn’t. York didn’t sound like he was judging him. And if he had been, Wash would’ve politely suggested he try _his_ luck against Maine. “Too sore to tell.”

York let loose a short peal of laughter. “Just wait until tomorrow.”

Wash groaned. “Please don’t remind me.”

“You gonna be able to get up on your own?” York asked, not moving from his position. He was a smart guy. Probably figured it was a trap.

But it wasn’t a ploy to enact a little payback for York’s earlier treachery. Sitting up seemed like an exhaustingly insurmountable task. Scrabbling together the effort to pull him down if he got too close was above and beyond what Wash could ask of his body at the moment. Hell, breathing was daunting enough.

“Yeah.” Despite that assertion, Wash didn’t make the attempt. He continued to lay there like a broken mannequin, wishing that he could skip straight to the being vertical part without all the unfortunate moving around that would be required to get there. After an excruciatingly long moment, he groaned and shoved himself up with all of the grace of a beached whale. “I got this.”

“Don’t strain yourself,” York joked, but for all that he was being an unhelpful asshole, it was friendly. Not a trace of disdain or malice.

“Too late,” Wash croaked back, with the faintest of weak chuckles.

A flicker of movement at the corner of his eye drew his attention and as he turned his head to track it, he saw Maine heading through the doorway. No goodbye. No nothing. He disappeared from view as the door slid back into place. Grimacing slightly in shamed disappointment, Wash looked back at York.

“That bad, huh?” he asked ruefully, trying to make light of it. Still rang a little flat, but he powered through it. A few of the other Freelancers didn’t seem to like him. What was one more?

But York shook his head. “Nah. Maine’s just not a real social guy. Likes to keep to himself.” Although he couldn’t see his eyes behind the visor, Wash could feel the weight of their gaze on him. “Most people won’t fight him one-on-one like that. Especially not more than once.”

Was that approval? It sounded like approval. “It’s good to lose a fight now and then. Least in a safe environment.” Wash shrugged one shoulder. “Teaches you how you’ll react.”

York was quiet for a moment, but it passed before Wash could try to interpret it. With a low hum, he jerked his head toward the door. “You wanna call it quits for today? Carolina’s probably wearing a hole in the floor waiting for us to skedaddle.”

Might’ve been his imagination, but it almost sounded like York’s tone had shifted. A bit warmer, maybe. Open and friendly in a way that it hadn’t been earlier, like he’d only been going through the motions for the look of the thing before but was settling into something genuine now.

“Sure,” Wash replied, already taking a step toward the exit. He tapped a finger against his chestplate. “If I get started now, I might even be able to get out of this thing before lunchtime.”

York laughed. “Don’t sweat it, man. It looks more complicated than it is, but I’ll give you a hand anyway.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

He hadn’t impressed anyone with his fighting prowess, hadn’t walked onto the training floor and handed the Project’s collection of veteran Freelancers their asses, hadn’t really done anything except lose every round he went, but all the same, it felt like he’d at least made a friend in Agent York.

* * *

Life quickly settled into a routine for Wash, and after three weeks with the Project, he felt like he was finally getting comfortable. In a lot of ways, it reminded him of boot camp. A couple hours of general exercise in the morning—aerobic activities to build endurance and their anaerobic counterparts for speed and strength—followed by combat lessons and weapons practice in the afternoon. Occasionally there were classes with his fellow Freelancers that covered a wide range of topics: from armor maintenance to guerrilla warfare, from the geography and history of the various human colonies around the galaxy to information the UNSC had gathered about the Covenant and the Insurrection over the many years of war. It was interesting and challenging and despite his initial reservations about his teammates, Wash found he was actually enjoying it.

He got to know some of the other Freelancers a bit better, too. His friendship with York continued to deepen and grow, and because York spent so much of his time with North Dakota, Wash struck up a friendship with him too. The guy was so laid-back and friendly that it was impossible not to like him, and soon the three of them spent more time together than they spent apart. North's twin sister South Dakota continued to be standoffish and unfriendly for no reason he could discern and he had no idea how to take Wyoming, but Connecticut—_“Oh for fuck’s sake, just call me Connie, Wash”_ —wasn't bad and Carolina, while not exactly _warm_ , didn't seem as dismissive and prickly after a while as she had during their first meeting. Florida was a little squirrelly, but Wash didn't see very much of him; he was often out on assignment and when he wasn't, he was with Wyoming. And Maine was, well, _Maine_.

He rarely spoke when he didn’t have to and he never spent his free time with anyone. Wash saw him in class and during training, but aside from that, the guy was like a ghost. Where he went and what he did was a mystery and none of the others seemed particularly interested in solving it. When Wash had asked York about it, he’d shrugged and told him not to take it personally, that Maine wasn't very sociable and preferred to be alone.

That should have been enough to convince Wash to focus on his training and the people that actually wanted to have something to do with him. He’d never been overly gregarious. Nobody could ever accuse him of being the life of the party or obnoxiously outgoing. And he was pretty savvy at reading social clues. If somebody didn’t want to be bothered, Wash typically recognized that and respected their wishes. But this was different.

He kept remembering their encounter the day he’d arrived and the way Maine had taken the time to explain points of strategy to him during that first training session. If he just wanted to be left alone, why had he hung around? Why had he given Wash that little tour through the ship? Why had he tried to teach him how to fight? He could’ve just been an asshole. Said something nasty or flat out ignored him and Wash would’ve taken the hint the same way he’d taken the hint from South. But he’d been downright personable and chatty, at least in relation to the way he usually behaved. It didn’t add up. And Wash had never been particularly adept at letting things go.

Which was why one evening, when he caught sight of him in the mess sitting alone in the corner with his dinner, Wash carried his tray over and sat down across from him without waiting for an invitation.

"Hey, Maine," he said cheerfully, like eating together was something they always did and he wasn't infringing on his solitude.

Maine had been in the middle of lifting a sandwich to his mouth when Wash had parked his ass in that chair. Now it hung there in mid-air, the motion of his hand arrested. _Probably surprised I had the balls to intrude._ His expression was mostly neutral, but his eyebrows rose. It wasn't an order to fuck off, though, so Wash took it as permission to stay.

"You know," he began, gesturing at Maine's sandwich. "I figured we'd be put on rations of tasteless scientific crap, like perfect mixtures of essential amino acids and whatever bullshit, but this stuff's actually pretty normal.” He took a bite of his cheeseburger, hastily swallowed it so he wasn’t talking with his mouth full, and gave Maine a closed-lip grin. "Tastes pretty good too. Better than the shit we got in the regular army."

Slowly, Maine finished bringing the sandwich to his mouth and bit into it. He didn't say anything, but he watched Wash like he was the only thing in the room. After a moment of unhurried chewing, Maine swallowed it and offered a low grunt, his expression not changing into anything that might have been interpreted as disgust, disapproval, or annoyance. Wash decided that meant agreement.

Had Maine been more talkative, he would have taken the opportunity to ask him about his experiences prior to joining the Project. Not about the scars—though he was curious to know what had fucked him up like that and how he’d walked away from it—but something less personal, that could be read as friendly interest instead of nosiness. Wash genuinely wanted to learn more about his teammates and he wasn’t inclined to dominate conversations by talking about himself. But that obviously wasn’t going to work here. He’d have to alter his strategy and take a less intrusive approach.

"I was actually expecting things here to be even more regimented than what I left," he continued, before shifting his attention back to his burger. After another bite, during which Maine said nothing, he added, "It's not bad, though. The people are pretty decent, too." A beat, and he heard himself saying, "Wyoming's a little weird."

It was an off-the-cuff observation; he didn’t mean to say it but he couldn’t take it back once he had. Wyoming _was_ weird. Of all the Freelancers, he was the one that set Wash the most on edge and he couldn’t pin down why. It made no sense. South was actively hostile toward him and the few times they spoke, Wyoming had been courteous and personable. But there just was something about him that bypassed logic and spoke directly to instinct. And instinct said not to trust him _at all_.

Still, Wash was a little embarrassed about badmouthing a teammate to another. It was unprofessional. At least, he felt that way until he heard a gruff rumble of sound from the other side of the table and realized that Maine was laughing. He didn’t exactly smile while he did it, but there was a faint upward cant to the corners of his mouth and a gleam in his dark eyes that couldn’t be anything other than humor.

That humor was infectious.

“See! You know what I’m talking about!” Grinning, Wash set his elbow on the table and leaned closer, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Admit it. He gives you the creeps too.”

One of Maine’s eyebrows rose so fast that for a moment, Wash thought he’d crossed the line. But after the initial rush of awkward horror abated, he remembered his audience. A guy like Maine probably wasn’t creeped out by anything. And once he realized that, he found himself examining a possibility he hadn’t previously considered.

Wyoming might have been largely avoided by the rest of the team, but he did have Florida, who by all accounts actually liked him. As far as Wash knew, Maine didn’t have anyone at all. He was huge and quiet and an unstoppable beast in the training room. Maybe that made him intimidating to the others. Maybe he wasn’t actively trying to keep to himself. Maybe the other Freelancers had been giving him a wide berth for so long that he’d quit trying to interact with them outside of what was necessary.

When viewed from that angle, the whole thing seemed pretty unfortunate. Just because he _might _have been able to smash someone’s head in with his bare hands wasn’t any reason to avoid the guy.

Tipping his head sideways in acknowledgement that maybe his comment was stupid, Wash gestured at Maine with his half-eaten burger. “All right, fine. He gives _me_ the creeps. But we can’t all be as badass as you.”

Maine exhaled hard enough that it came out sounding like a snort. Or possibly a very abrupt chuckle. Either way, Wash accepted it and settled back in his seat. He took another bite out of the burger and for a few minutes, they sat in companionable silence eating their dinner. It was actually kind of nice. Wash wasn’t big on talking just to hear himself talk or making noise for the hell of it and some of the other Freelancers could get pretty rowdy. In fact, last week, three of them had started a food fight in the middle of dinner that had shut the mess down for two days. Eating in peace was a welcome deviation from the usual chaos of too many Freelancers contained in one small space.

“Are you doing anything later tonight?” Wash asked, breaking the silence only after the last french fry had disappeared down his throat.

Looking up from the heap of potato chips he was picking through, Maine cocked his head in an unspoken question.

“Probably should’ve asked if you like playing cards first, huh?” Wash breathed out a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “Sorry. Just kind of took it for granted. Everybody in my old unit did. It was our main form of entertainment whenever we got a little downtime.”

After a mildly curious look, one side of Maine’s mouth twisted and his eyebrows rose as he tipped a shoulder up toward his ear. It wasn’t a no. It didn’t look like an emphatic yes either. But it was just cards. Wash couldn’t pretend that he was bursting with excitement over it either. However, it was something to do that wasn’t reviewing Freelancer protocol or reading over the lock picking manual again.

“You want to come by my room after class and play a few games?” It was only after he said it that Wash realized that it sounded like something a kid would ask. Not a goddamn adult. There was some minute change in Maine’s expression that told Wash he was probably thinking the same thing, so he offered a wry, lopsided half-smile. “And afterward, we can go down to the drive-thru and get milkshakes!”

Once again, Maine’s lips twitched. Two smiles—tiny and barely existent, but Wash was counting them—in one sitting? Whether he eventually agreed to cards or not, dinner had still been a win. _Wash – one. Social isolation – zero_, he thought with a trace of pride.

“Eh?” It took some effort and an awkward expression, but Wash managed to waggle his eyebrows in mock enticement. “What do you say?”

Maine snorted. “Tonight,” he agreed in that low, gravelly voice. There was a faint, unusual lilt to it that might have been amusement.

Wash’s smile was unabashedly triumphant. He didn’t care if Maine thought he was an idiot for it. “Full disclosure, the milkshakes were false advertising. But I _might_ be able to convince York to donate some beer to make up for it.”

A low grunt of indeterminate meaning was his response, but an air of agreement still hung over the table. Maine’s posture remained relaxed and that suggestion of a smile had yet to disappear. It was a yes. It had to be.

They finished eating without saying much else. Wash felt a superstitious compulsion to be quiet lest he say something inadvertently offensive and put Maine off from their card game. He knew it was silly, he didn’t normally have that severe a case of foot-in-mouth disease, but all the same, he wasn’t ready to tempt fate.

Standing up to return his tray, Wash shot Maine an inquisitive glance. “Twenty-one hundred sound all right to you?”

He got a nearly imperceptible dip in Maine’s chin that he might have missed had he not been watching him so closely.

Grinning, Wash raised a hand in farewell as he turned to go. “See you then.”

The rest of the night passed uneventfully. Wash joined Connie and Florida for firearms training, and after two hours of running an obstacle course and shooting at targets, he was ready to relax. A warm shower helped eradicate the possibility of sore muscles in the morning and after putting on a fresh set of clothes, he headed to York’s room to procure the promised refreshments. He couldn’t stick around to chat. Nevertheless, they had a brief conversation about what the hell Wash was doing before York sent him back to his quarters with two bottles and some unsolicited advice on how not to lose all of his money or provoke Maine into strangling him.

Of course, there was a possibility that he wouldn’t even show up. He could’ve gotten busy, been given some special assignment from the Director, or straight up changed his mind about wasting his free time hanging out with the rookie. But Wash thought he was decent company and he wanted to be ready on the off-chance that Maine surprised him.

At 2100 sharp, there was a dull rap against his door. When he opened it, there was Maine.

Like Wash, he was dressed in casual clothes. Another grey t-shirt—just as tight as the first one, the fabric worn thin enough that Wash was distracted by the visible outline of hardened nipples—and black track pants. By the time he managed to jerk his eyes up to his face, the back of Wash’s neck was burning in embarrassment, but Maine’s expression was surprisingly unperturbed about having been so blatantly checked out.

Clearing his throat, Wash stepped out of the doorway. “Come in?”

Amazingly, he did.

Cards went a lot like dinner had. They didn’t talk much, and when they did, it was mostly Wash offering commentary or asking questions and Maine responding with only a few words or easily deciphered expressions. But that was all right. Their silence was as light and companionable there in his quarters as it had been in the mess. A few times—Wash wasn’t keeping count except for how he was: precisely twice and one time that almost qualified—Maine laughed in that low, throaty way Wash had heard earlier that evening. And he stayed until 2315.

“We’ll have to do this again sometime,” Wash said as Maine was leaving, a little bit hopeful and a lot decisive.

It had been fun, and he was discovering that the more time he spent with him, the easier it was becoming to understand what the nuances of his expressions and body language meant. There’d been times that night when Maine had shot him a look or cocked his head just so and Wash could’ve sworn he’d known exactly what he was thinking. That too turned out to be pretty nice, almost like having a bunch of inside jokes or knowing someone for so long that they could have whole conversations in the span of a sideways glance.

Wash wasn’t expecting a response, yet Maine stopped in the doorway to look back over his shoulder at him. “Okay.”

It was the agreement as much as it was the verbalization of that agreement that made Wash grin at him. “Beer was just that good, huh?” he joked, knowing it wasn’t the beer but not sure how else to take Maine’s willingness to spend more time playing cards with him when he could do literally anything else. Loneliness? Boredom?

Maine gave him an inscrutable look, then grunted softly and left the room. It obviously meant something, but Wash couldn’t figure it out, and after pondering it for a few minutes, he gave up worrying about it. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they might actually end up friends after all.

The rest was irrelevant.

* * *

**Present day — 3 years after the Reclamation**

* * *

Sighing heavily, Emily set her cup of coffee down on the table and slumped bonelessly into the uncomfortable plastic chair. For a long moment, she ignored the coffee, choosing instead to simply sit there and rub wearily at her eyes.

"Rough night?" Oliver asked, glancing up from his datapad with a crooked smile.

She snorted. "You could say that."

The smile turned sympathetic. "What happened?"

Propping her elbow on the table, Emily rested her cheek against the heel of her hand and reached for the cup with the other. She didn't answer him right away, just peered into the dark depths of the coffee like it held the secrets of life and death. _What _ hadn’t _ happened?_

"Paging Doctor Clarke," Oliver prompted, nudging at her foot with the toe of his shoe. "Code Blue."

That made her groan. "Christ, don't even joke about that."

"That bad?" His eyebrows rose.

Nodding, she lifted the cup and took a sip. The coffee was still too hot, but the splash of scalding liquid across her tongue helped wake her up a little. "Almost lost him four times."

Oliver rolled his eyes and set the pad down, giving her his full attention. "Now what?”

"Same old story." She shrugged, frustrated. "Bad reaction to the stabilizers. We had to flash-clone _three_ sets of lungs before one finally took and there’s no guarantee that pair won’t fail too. "

"Think he's gonna make it?"

That was the million credit question. _Would_ the poor man make it? None of them knew. By rights, he should have been dead years ago . But he wasn't dead. He wasn't exactly _alive_ either. He’d been delivered to them in stasis, and since they’d brought him out of it, he required round the clock care to ensure that he didn’t actually die while the medical team struggled to repair the extensive damage that had been done to his body. Not once had he showed any sign of regaining consciousness.

Emily shook her head helplessly before taking another sip of coffee. Then she stared moodily into the cup and muttered darkly, "I think the boss is going to kill us if he doesn't."

"Oh, come on,” Oliver scoffed. “He isn't that bad."

"No, I know." They were all stressed out and had been running on limited sleep for weeks, causing tempers to flare hotter than usual. "But you should’ve seen his face when he flat-lined the second time."

It’d been so quick that anyone not looking would have missed it, but Emily had glanced up to check one of the monitors and had inadvertently caught a glimpse of their employer's expression before he’d smoothed it out: rage and desperation like nothing she’d ever seen.

"It's not your fault the guy's a mess," Oliver was saying reassuringly, the sound of his voice bringing her out of the memory. "He's lucky the poor bastard's still alive at all."

She exhaled a soft huff. "No kidding."

"So what's his status now?"

"Stable but unresponsive." She shook her head. "Same as he's been."

"Well..." Oliver rubbed absently at his mouth. "He was under for a long time."

Talk about understatement of the century. "I know."

"Even if he does wake up, there might not be anything left." _Leave it to Oliver to say what we're all trying to ignore._ "Whatever the boss wants him for, he might not get it."

And god help them all if that was the case. "I know," she repeated.

Tipping his chin down, Oliver leaned toward her. "Does he?"

"He isn't an idiot." They all might have questions about their boss—who he was, why he'd brought them together, why this particular man was worth shelling out the massive amount of credits he was tossing around—but the one thing she couldn't question was his intelligence. "He knows what we're dealing with."

Oliver had to concede the point. "Still, it makes you wonder why _this_ guy, doesn't it?" He waved a hand idly. "There has to be a dozen, _two_ dozen better candidates for whatever this project is. Hell, with how much he's paying us, he could probably convince the military to make him some Spartans."

That got a chuckle out of her despite her exhaustion. "Somehow, I don't think the UNSC goes for that kind of thing."

He laughed. "I don't know. He could offer to fund one of their secret projects or something. The military’s always looking for money."

Much as she hated to admit it, he had a point. Odds were, their patient was damaged beyond repair. The amount of work and resources going into trying to return him to life probably could have funded the creation of the boss’ own personal Spartan. Made to order, even. But he'd been adamant the first time someone had raised an objection. It was _this_ man. This one and no one else.

The mystery alone was almost as compelling as the exorbitant payment she was receiving for her time and the professional acclaim she would earn if they were successful in returning him to life. Provided, of course, that the man wasn’t gorked, she would be able to meet him, find out directly from the source what was so special about him.

"I guess this is why we aren't getting paid to ask questions," she said finally.

Oliver snorted. "No, we're getting paid to be miracle workers." He spread his hands wide. "And so far, we aren't doing so great at that."

She arched an eyebrow. "You want to quit?"

"Hell no." Oliver grinned at her. "He might be asking the impossible, but the boss is paying too much to turn him down."

It wasn’t just the money that motivated him, though. It was pride, too. Same as her. "We're the best," she said matter-of-factly. "If we can't do this, no one can."

"Yeah, but you do think we actually can?"

"Sometimes." And sometimes she thought the whole ship was going to go up in a blaze, either because the boss exploded or one of the frustrated doctors did. "I don't know. We'll see."

Emily glanced at her watch and blew out a hard, long-suffering sigh. She quickly drank the rest of the coffee, ignoring the burn as it slid down her throat. "I gotta go. I have a meeting with the boss in twenty minutes and I want to try to make myself look like I know what I'm doing."

Reaching over, Oliver gave her a pat on the arm. "Take it easy, okay? Try not to let him stress you out too much."


	2. Chapter 2

“Do you understand your orders?” the Director asked, arms folded behind his back as he surveyed the Freelancers standing armored and at attention in front of him.

They’d been in the middle of running a simulation on effective ways to take back an installation held by enemy forces when the Counselor had unexpectedly arrived and put an end to training. He’d ordered them to suit up and get to the briefing room in fifteen minutes. They’d complied without question, though Wash had shot a few questioning glances at his teammates that had gone unanswered. There simply hadn’t been time to talk while they hurried into their armor and hustled to the briefing room. Wash’s mind had been awhirl with possibilities: a test, an actual mission, deployment onto the front lines somewhere, a Covenant attack on Earth, each scenario getting progressively worse until his imagination had built it up to the Freelancers being all that stood in the way of humanity’s utter annihilation.

Thankfully, it turned out not to be that dire.

It _was_ a mission—Wash’s first with the Project—but it didn’t sound like the fate of the human race was hanging in the balance. Insurrectionists had claimed a remote military outpost on some moon in what remained of the Outer Colonies and the UNSC wanted it back. Project Freelancer had been assigned retrieval duty and due to the size of the outpost, they were being divided into two teams and sent in with limited air support. It sounded like the kind of thing Spartans might have been called in to deal with, had they not already been occupied trying to turn the tide of a losing war. But in their absence, apparently the Director's Freelancers had gotten the job.

Wash was assigned to Beta team, joining Maine, Connecticut, and South Dakota under the command of North Dakota. Their job was to take out the enemy forces while Carolina led Alpha team—York, Wyoming, Florida—straight to the base commander. It wasn't hard to read between the lines. Beta was to draw attention while Alpha sneaked around and Wash, being the newest recruit and untried with the team in actual combat, wasn’t trusted with the delicacy required for Alpha’s mission.

He joined his voice to the chorus of “_Yes, sir_” that rang out in response to the Director’s question and, once dismissed, followed his team to the hangar bay. Two Pelicans waited for them, primed and ready to go. Alpha headed for one and Beta moved to the other.

As they parted ways, York looked over at Wash and called out, “Hey rookie! Try not to die right out of the gate, all right?”

Wash rolled his eyes, not caring that the gesture was concealed by his helmet's visor. "Very funny, asshole."

“York!” Carolina barked from inside the Pelican. “Focus on the mission.”

“Yeah, yeah,” York returned as he sauntered inside, leaving Wash with a wave that was entirely too cheery for his _helpful_ advice. “Just gotta—” The rest of what he was saying was lost as the Alpha team’s Pelican closed its door and Wash entered his own.

He looked at the available seats, then chose one as far away from the door as he could. This was his least favorite part of being deployed anywhere. It was silly; he could handle being dropped in the middle of a firefight with more aplomb than he could tolerate the flight to get there. There was just something about riding in a Pelican’s cargo bay that made him nauseated. Maybe it was the pitch of the engines aggravating his inner ear or the somewhat choppy way it handled atmospheric entries and exits. Or hell, maybe it was all just psychosomatic, the association with fighting and death and an overload of adrenaline subconsciously churning his gut into a queasy mess. There was a reason they’d called them blood trays and it hadn’t been because the corrugated floors resembled phlebotomy equipment.

_Keep it together_ , he told himself firmly, thankful that the helmet kept the others from seeing his face. In spite of the armor’s temperature regulation, he was flushed and sweating and they hadn’t even taken off yet. _These people are depending on you. Don’t make them doubt your competency by throwing up in your fucking helmet._

Hoping for a distraction, Wash turned his attention to his teammates. South and Connie were sitting together near the door. North was standing in front of South, one steadying hand on the overhead compartment above her, checking the seat restraints while she told him to fuck off and stop babying her. Maine was stowing his rifle, unconcerned by the commotion at the back of the craft.

The engines suddenly roared to life, breaking through the illusion that they weren’t about to take off. Wash took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. When that didn’t help, and his stomach lurched uncomfortably as the Pelican’s thrusters lifted the bird off the deck and propelled it out of the hangar, he took another one. Then a third for good, and ultimately useless, measure.

He must have zoned while focused on trying to breathe his uncooperative stomach into submission, because he was abruptly snapped back into the middle of the Pelican by a knock against his knee. Blinking dry eyes, Wash glanced sideways and found the large amber visor of Maine's helmet facing him from a half a meter away. _Shit. How long has he been sitting there?_

They regarded each other in silence until it became clear that Maine was waiting for something. "What?"

Maine nodded in his direction.

"Yeah." Maybe the gesture actually meant something else, but Wash didn't have the energy to second-guess his interpretation. "I'm fine."

The angle of the helmet changed slightly. Once, he might have waffled over whether that indicated disbelief or confusion over why he thought himself so important that Maine would give a shit whether he was all right or not. But after three weeks of hanging out together—eating meals, playing card games in the evenings, one-on-one combat practice, workout sessions—he knew it meant the former.

Wash copped to the lie with a sigh, then instantly regretted it as his stomach roiled in protest. "Nausea." He kept his voice down, not wanting the disclosure to reach the other end of the Pelican. The last thing he needed was for South to mock him for the duration of the trip. "It's... I don't know. Happens a lot in these things."

Unsurprisingly, Maine said nothing to that.

Although they’d been spending a fair amount of time together, it hadn’t even been a month. There was still a hell of a lot Wash didn't know about him. Most things, really. But the one thing he _did_ know was that Maine hadn’t gotten chattier as their tentative friendship developed. He was just a naturally quiet guy. One who didn’t talk unless he had something to say. And he clearly didn't have anything to say now.

But he didn’t get up to go sit elsewhere. He stayed right there beside Wash for the entire trip, a silent, immovable presence that inexplicably made the whole ordeal a little less unpleasant. It wasn’t until South looked over at them and made a snide comment about the riveting conversation taking place at the front of the Pelican that he made any noise at all, though that was little more than dismissive grunt.

As they approached their destination, Maine reached over and hit the button to release their restraints. Then he stood and started picking through the weapons that North had been laying out for the last few minutes. It looked like a familiar, meticulous routine and Wash watched unabashed, absently grateful that his helmet concealed his interest from everyone else.

Picking up an assault rifle, Maine ejected the magazine and looked it over for a moment, then pushed it back in and slung the onto the magnetic holster on his back. He repeated the examination of two magnums, double-checking their ammunition before locking each one into place on either side of his thighs, and then moved on to stuffing a few extra magazines into the ammunition pouch at his hip. By the time he picked up a second rifle, Wash was smiling in amusement.

Given what he'd seen in the training room and the stories he'd heard from York of previous missions, Maine was deadly enough with his bare hands. Loading himself down with guns like he was just reinforced the idea that the guy was a one-man army. _Stupid bastards won't know what hit them. _ A vision of Maine storming a nondescript compound with nothing but a handgun, casually slaughtering a seemingly endless wave of faceless soldiers took shape in his mind. _Wonder if he'll even need the rest of us._

The sudden appearance of that other rifle scant centimeters from his face startled him back to the present. He grabbed it automatically, preventing it from knocking against his visor, and looked up. Maine released it into his hand and turned back to the stockpile of weapons. A moment later, a couple spare magazines came sailing toward him. Deftly plucking them from the air, Wash stood up, shoved them into his own pouch, and slapped the rifle onto his back.

"Pass me a pistol, would you?" he asked, nodding toward one of the unclaimed magnums as Connie and South walked over to arm themselves.

Without a word, Maine did as requested, though this time he carried the gun and its accompanying ammunition over and handed it off to him. Somewhere in the middle of stowing all of it on his armor, the Pelican touched down on the moon's surface and Wash realized he'd been too distracted by what he was doing to pay attention to its descent. He peered suspiciously over at Maine, but he was too busy picking up a few frag grenades to look Wash's way. _Little too convenient there, buddy._

A hand clapped onto his shoulder with a dull clatter. "All set?"

Wash cast one last glance at Maine, then focused on North and nodded. "Yeah. Ready to roll."

North tipped his head in acknowledgement. "Everybody do a comms check and set your trackers. Once we hit the compound, we're not going to have the time."

In a few seconds, three little yellow markers blinked across Wash's HUD as his system came online. He transmitted his own IFF tag to the others, then made a quick adjustment to the volume of his comm speaker.

"All right, team." North moved into the center of the Pelican to look them over, affording Wash the opportunity to do the same to him. Unlike the rest of them, he was armed only with the magnum at his hip and the sniper rifle in his hands. "Clear the targets out of your sections and minimize property damage as much as possible. I'll be your eyes for as long as I'm able. South?"

Over at the door, his sister knocked her fist against the operation panel. It blinked green and a moment later, the Pelican's bay door swung open. South was the first one out, followed closely by Connie. North and Maine hit the ground at approximately the same time, Wash only a few seconds behind them. They fanned out, North ducking away to find the highest available vantage while the rest headed toward their designated quadrants.

The battle started almost immediately.

As it turned out, subtlety_ wasn’t_ all the rage in Project Freelancer. The comm channel quickly filled with the sound of gunfire and, during a frantic dash across a courtyard, Wash noticed a thick column of smoke rising over the top of one of the installation's taller buildings. Not even ten minutes after North’s admonishment not to cause too much damage to the property and something was already on fire.

North's soft "_Goddamn it, Maine_" identified the source of the commotion and Maine, unsurprisingly, said nothing. No one else commented on it. Or said much of anything at all. North occasionally called out the location of hidden Insurrectionists whenever one of the Freelancers seemed set to blunder into them unaware and sometimes he and South got into an argument over something she was doing, but aside from that, chatter was pretty minimal.

It was different from the battles with the Covenant. Those had been chaotic clusterfucks, everyone yelling and cursing and volleying increasingly alarmed shouts back and forth as plasma bursts fried flesh and circuitry alike. Wash wasn't used to working with people who spent more time bantering in the heat of battle than expressing concern or fear, if they spoke at all.

Though to be fair, he wasn’t used to this kind of job, either.

Objectively, he knew that the Insurrectionists were a serious problem. Humanity already had enough to worry about with the Covenant doing its damnedest to drive it to extinction. It didn’t need a secondary war with itself on top of that. But the selfish idiots didn’t seem to care that they were ultimately hastening their own demise by continuing the now moot conflict with the UEG. And since practically all of the military’s resources were allocated to the Great War, there wasn’t any way to put an end to them once and for all. Had the Covenant never attacked, it was likely that enlisting in the UNSC would have meant deployment to the Outer Colonies to deal with them. But it had attacked and Wash had spent the entirety of his marine career mowing down as many alien bastards as he could. He’d never been sent out against humans, though he’d known that that remained a—very slim—possibility.

Knowing, however, wasn’t the same as doing. For all that he’d been fine with it in theory, it was still strange to see a human at the other end of his gun when it had always been Jackals, Grunts, Elites, and in one memorable instance, a Hunter. And when he pulled the trigger, the blood was red instead of purple or blue and something about that just felt _wrong_ to him on a visceral level. These people were as dangerous as the Covenant, perhaps more so since they could infiltrate a human city unnoticed and blow it halfway to hell before anyone knew there was even a threat. But Wash couldn’t ignore how peculiar it made him feel.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to make him hesitate when he turned a corner and found himself face to face with a surprised rebel. He brought up his rifle immediately, before the guy finished reaching for his own, and put a round directly into his chest. At such close range, the man was dead before he hit the ground. Wash hurried on his way without a backward glance.

There was a door a few meters away. If he could get inside the building, he might finally be able to ditch the sniper who’d been dogging him for the last minute. Twice, he’d narrowly avoided getting shot in the back and he knew if he didn’t get the hell out of the line of fire soon, he was going to push his luck too far.

“North,” he said as he neared the door. “You got eyes on me?”

It only took a second for North’s smooth voice to answer. “Roger that.”

“Do you see this asshole who keeps shooting at me?”

“Not at the moment.” His tone took on a faint edge of good-humored teasing. “You want to step out away from the wall and do a little dance? Give him something to shoot at?”

“Fuck you,” Wash shot back without heat, reaching for the door handle. Nothing happened when he tried it. A little forceful jiggling couldn’t budge it either. _Fuck it._ He slammed the butt of his rifle down onto it, snapping it off.

“Property damage,” North chided softly, as Wash poked at the hole in the door, clearing out the locking mechanism.

“I thought Maine blew up a whole fucking building!” He elbowed the door open harder than necessary, hoping North could hear the crash as it hit the wall, and stepped inside.

A casual scan of the interior revealed a storeroom piled with pallets full of supplies. Motion trackers weren’t picking up any movement, but just to be sure, Wash switched to thermals. His HUD remained cool and dark.

“How’s it look in there?” North asked, after he’d had a moment to investigate the interior.

“Empty.” Wash edged back to the doorway and peered out. The courtyard was as empty as the storeroom. No errant bullets pinged off of the ground or the nearby walls. “Just a storeroom.”

“All right. I’m going to—”

Silence followed, lasting long enough that Wash stuck his head back out through the doorway and looked around. There were no noticeable signs of fighting. He couldn’t hear any commotion: no guns, no explosions, no background noise from his teammates. There wasn’t even extra smoke wafting over the roofs of any of the buildings in his line of sight. Wash drummed his fingers impatiently against his rifle, slightly unnerved by North’s silence in the absence of a noticeable problem.

“How’s your ammo?”

The abrupt sound of North's voice in his ear was startling. He tried to play it off as nonchalantly shifting his weight, but he was still standing in the doorway. The likelihood of North not having seen that stupid flinch through his scope was slim to fucking nil.

Skin tingling with a weird combination of sheepish embarrassment and wary forewarning, Wash checked his readout. "Pretty good. Why?"

“Maine’s got a situation." He sounded almost _too_ calm. “Can you—”

“Set me a marker,” Wash cut him off, already easing through the doorway and glancing to either side. So far, so good. The coast looked clear. “I’ll take care of it.”

North gave a breathless little chuckle. “You want the intel first or would you rather charge in blind?”

“Not gonna change my mind but I won’t say no to a heads-up.”

A little blue indicator popped up in the lower corner of his map, just shy of four hundred meters away. It wasn't very far, but it wasn't necessarily going to be easy: there was a maze of buildings between them that offered too many opportunities for concealment and ambush. Wash didn't stop to think about it, already on the move back the way he'd come.

“He’s pinned down," North reported mildly, like he was discussing the weather. "Group of about twenty are closing in on him and I can't get a better angle to help out. Guy's good, but that many's just asking for one of them to get lucky."

“How’s my path look?”

“Depends how fast you move and how good you are at dodging bullets.”

Not so good, then. “Can you cover me?”

“Stand by.”

Whether that meant literally stand there and wait while he figured it out or not, Wash wasn’t taking chances. The longer he stalled, the greater the likelihood of something going wrong. Keeping one eye on the area in front of him and one on the real estate above, Wash stepped into the intersection and took a right, following the path laid out on his map. The alertness paid off. When a flicker of motion caught the corner of his eye, he fired, taking out one of the rebels before he could get a shot of his own off. Another man came into view from behind an overhang on the roof of a supply shed across the way, but he pitched headlong over the edge and crashed unmoving to the ground without Wash needing to do anything.

North’s work, then.

"That’s an affirmative, Wash,” came his unseen savior’s voice a second later. "Nailed your sniper, too. You're free to move."

It occurred to him then that he hadn't heard so much as a curse from South for a while. North had switched them over to a private channel at some point in their conversation without him even noticing. It didn't take a genius to figure out why.

“Maine has no idea you’re sending backup, does he?”

“Nope,” North replied cheerfully. “He’d never accept it if he did. Probably charge out and do something stupid just to spite me.” His easy conversational tone shifted seamlessly to cool professionalism. “On my mark, run like hell and don’t stop until you reach him.”

Wash nodded. Then, even though he figured North saw it, he added for good measure, “Got it.”

“_Go._”

He went.

Thanks to his years on the front line, Wash was as fit as he could be and the specialized training he’d undergone during his time with the Project had only honed his athletic abilities. Ordinarily, a four hundred meter sprint was nothing, and after training in it for so long, even the armor didn’t slow him down anymore. In fact, it actually augmented his speed. But there was a lot of shit between him and Maine—buildings, walkways, fences, storage containers, support structures—and people were shooting at him. The journey wasn’t nearly as quick as he would have liked.

Pelting down a walkway, Wash caught sight of two armed guards stepping out into view from a side corridor. Sacrificing accuracy for speed, he opened fire. Both dropped, one from three of his wild shots and one from a single neat bullet between the eyes. He didn’t stop, just swerved around them, reached the end of the path, and vaulted over a waist-high barricade. There was an unexpected drop on the other side, but he hit the ground rolling and was back up on his feet and moving before the impact really registered.

"You're coming up on an intersection," North told him. "Three targets, two to your left, one to your right. You're gonna have to get creative, because I can't get a clear shot."

Wash suppressed the urge to groan. "Standing or crouched?"

"Standing." A small moment of silence followed. "I think."

_Fan-fucking-tastic_. Wash was an excellent soldier, but he wasn't a brilliant one. There was always a better marksman or someone more creatively minded when it came to strategic planning. He cared, though, saw his squad as people instead of cannon-fodder and he was aggressive enough that anger came more easily to him than fear. He wasn't worried about the rising likelihood of getting shot. He was too busy getting angry that there was this stupid as fuck obstacle between him and his friend.

Transferring the rifle to his dominant hand to help mitigate the recoil, Wash reached for the pistol with his right. _Should've grabbed a few grenades_, he thought irritably. _Next time, jackass, be prepared. _There wasn't any further time to spare on self-castigation. He was nearing the intersection and had to pay attention.

Wash didn't stop when he reached it. He just extended both arms out and started firing as he ran past. The rifle maintained a spray of bullets that he hoped would take out the two rebels filling the corridor or at least force them to run for cover and keep them occupied until he was gone. It was a little trickier with the magnum, it wasn't automatic, but he pressed the trigger as fast as he could. If North said anything, Wash didn’t hear it, too narrowly focused on what he was doing to waste mental resources on anything else.

Miraculously, his luck held and he made it through without taking a hit. Wash stopped firing but he didn't stop running, just slapped the magnum back onto its holster and reloaded the rifle on the go. Without the threat of impending death preoccupying him, he could hear North laughing.

"You are one crazy son of a bitch, you know that?" he said between chuckles. "Guess you belong with the Project after all."

He snorted in disbelief. The adrenaline high was still going strong, too strong to be insulted by the comment or start questioning what the others thought of him. "What? Was that in doubt?"

"Nah, man." The way he said it was too casually dismissive to be anything but genuine. "But now it'll never be."

"Did I even manage to hit one of them?"

North laughed. "You did better than that. Killed all three of them."

"Holy shit," he whispered in stunned surprise. Wash wasn't the worst shot. In the army, he'd actually been one of their better marksmen. But among the Freelancers, he was a long way from the ranking he'd held with the marines.

"Don't let it go to your head, huh?"

"Wouldn't worry about that," Wash retorted dryly. "How's the road ahead looking?"

His answer came back seconds later. "Well, it's a little congested, but—"

There was a service ladder coming up on Wash's right. He glanced at it, followed it up to the roof, and did a bit of quick triangulation with the marker steadily blinking in the corner of his map. If he was recalling the layout of the installation properly and _if_ his spatial skills were up to par, the ladder was a shortcut.

"Fuck it," he said, cutting North off as he veered toward it. "I'm improvising.”

Grabbing onto one of the rungs above his head, Wash swung onto the ladder and quickly climbed up. What he could see of the rooftop was empty, but he didn’t lower his guard. Alert for ambush, he took off across it at a fast clip, vaulting over air vents and maintenance access ports and dodging around the generators and storage containers. When he came upon an unexpected gap between two buildings, there was no time to overthink it. He took the leap, came down on the other side, and kept going.

When the marker flashed, signaling his arrival, Wash slowed to a stop and looked around. There was nothing to see on the roof, so he ducked down and snuck as quietly as he could to the edge. There, he peered over and took in the scene.

It was a large U-shaped area that opened up into the desolate, unsettled part of the moon’s landscape. Above the rocky terrain loomed the stark vastness of space. A faint shimmer against the light of the stars, easy to dismiss as an optical illusion, was the only visible hint of the atmospheric shield currently maintaining the oxygen bubble around the outpost. Although it was empty at the moment, it looked big enough to accommodate a small ship. _Must be where they receive their supplies. _

Thanks to his vantage, it was easy to spot Maine, tucked in behind a large pile of crates that he obviously intended to use as cover. And maybe if they’d been positioned differently, they would’ve been more useful, but the haphazard way they’d been dumped meant that Maine would have to keep his eyes on opposite directions if he wanted to prevent anyone from coming up behind him. Against a few of them, that might not have been too hard. Against more than a dozen? The odds weren’t good. But his posture was confident instead of fearful, like he was about to spring a devastating ambush.

Either his motion tracker was busted and he didn't know how many men were coming or he did and he wasn’t worried about being so outnumbered. Wash had a fleeting moment to wonder what happened that had led to this, then rebels started pouring through two secondary passages, one on either side of the landing zone, and converging on Maine's location.

He didn’t pause to consider what he was doing. As Maine started to move around one corner of the crates, Wash jumped off of the roof directly into the path of the right flank of rebels and opened fire. His unexpected arrival set off a chorus of shouts before everything was drowned out by gunfire.

Wading into a knot of rebels, Wash shot one in the chest, ducked a punch by a second, and took a kick in the hip from a third. It sent him staggering to the side, scrambling for balance, and coincidentally saved his life. A bullet buzzed past him, so close that it set off the warning sensors on his armor. Swearing under his breath, he twisted around and put two rounds into the guy who'd nearly scored a hit.

His HUD flared red, warning him that he'd run out of bullets. There wasn't time to dig a new mag out and reload. Slapping the rifle onto his back with one hand, Wash drew the magnum with the other.

A vicious kick to the stomach doubled over his last opponent and a sharp knee to the face sent him sprawling onto the ground. Without a second thought, Wash shot him in the head. Now that he was fighting for his teammate’s life, the blood that spilled onto the dull ground was practically indistinguishable from that of a Covenant warrior.

The immediate threats neutralized, Wash had a second to breathe. He used it to scan the battlefield and take a quick count of the remaining targets. Off to his left, Maine was mowing through a small group of them, using his rifle as a bludgeon to smash in their heads.

A bullet cracked into the ground half a pace from Wash’s foot. Another followed. He dove to the side, rolled to his feet, and took off running in a wildly staggered path. Reaching behind his back, he returned fire, more to provide himself some cover than in any real hope of hitting anything. All too aware that he was running out of bullets, Wash swung around and fired the last two rounds into the shooter's torso just as his back smacked into something hard and unyielding.

It felt like his heart skipped a beat as panic swelled, momentarily eclipsing the adrenaline rush that had carried him this far. Wash twisted as fast as he could, free hand scrabbling at his belt for a full magazine, and found himself face to face with Maine.

The taller man grunted in acknowledgement. Wash didn't know whether to curse or laugh. He settled for a wheezing kind of huff instead.

"Hope you don't mind me dropping by," he said lightly.

Maine didn't respond and it wasn’t possible to see his expression through the visor, but Wash could just _feel_ him rolling his eyes.

The ping of a bullet striking a nearby container drew Wash's attention back to the fight. He finished reloading his gun and returned fire, only dimly aware of Maine grabbing the rifle off his back and casually pilfering a fresh magazine from his pouch. _Must've run out of ammo_.

Together, covering each other's blind spots, they took out the rest of the rebels in relatively short order. Wash got hit in the thigh, but the bullet struck the armor plate instead of the vulnerable seam. The impact registered enough to knock his aim askew for a moment, but otherwise he emerged from the battle unscathed. If Maine got shot, he couldn't tell. The man never made a sound and he never staggered or slowed.

As the last rebel fell, Wash activated the group comm channel. “Hey North. We clear?”

The answer came back a moment later. "Affirmative. You two think you can head east and meet up with Connie?"

He glanced at Maine, who canted his head to the side. Assuming disagreement would be more obvious, he nodded. “Yeah. We’re on the way.”

Another blue marker blipped to life on Wash’s tracker, and without another word, they set off toward it. As they passed a dead rebel, Maine dipped down and scooped up a discarded rifle. He checked the ammunition, then continued on his way. At the next body, he did the same thing, though this time he tossed the scavenged rifle to Wash.

The toe of his boot knocked into something, sending it rolling across the ground. Looking down, Wash saw that it was a grenade and snatched it on his way past._ One of those idiots must’ve dropped it. _If they got outnumbered again, it might help even the odds.

Stepping sideways, Wash nudged Maine with his elbow. “We ought to do this more often.” He made no effort to soften the edge of adrenaline-induced excitement in his voice. “We make a pretty good team.”

He got the distinct sense that Maine was looking at him. After a few seconds of silence, he huffed. It sounded somewhat amused. Wash took it as an affirmative.

They filtered into one of the corridors, Wash nudging ahead to go first even though it was wide enough for them to walk abreast. It was automatic, a holdover from his corporal days of prioritizing the lives of his men over his own. He’d never been one to lead from the back and dropping to the bottom of the pecking order hadn’t changed that. Whether he understood what Wash was doing or not, Maine didn’t object.

Although he was attentive to both his HUD’s readout and the landscape as they crept along, nothing suspicious teased at his peripheral vision or registered with the armor’s scanners. Which was why, as he passed by a seemingly empty dark alcove, he gave it only a cursory glance. There was nothing there. Until suddenly there was.

A loud _bang_ sent him diving to the ground before his brain finished processing that it just heard a gun. Rolling onto his back, Wash brought up his rifle, but Maine was already there, pulling a man out from the shadow of the doorway by his throat and snapping his neck with a sharp jerk of his hands. Dropping the body, he stepped over it and held out a hand. Wash took it, ignoring the twinge of pain in his shoulder, and Maine hauled him up with enviable effortlessness.

_How fucking strong is he?_ He couldn’t stop himself from looking him over, as if the answer was stamped onto the armor encasing Maine’s torso. Some day, he promised himself, he was going to ask. And keep asking until he pried the information out of him.

“All right?” Maine rumbled.

Had it been anyone else, he would’ve quickly brushed it off. Wash might have been new to the team, but he wasn’t new to war and he wasn’t a baby. Of course he was fucking fine. But if Maine was going to go through the effort of actually _asking_, he wasn’t going to throw his concern back in his face.

“Yeah.” He gave his shoulder an experimental roll. More pain followed, but he’d felt worse. “Must’ve landed badly. Shoulder’s not right.”

Maine stared at him for a couple seconds, then nodded and got going. No pestering questions, no demands for reassurance, no insinuations that he wasn’t competent. It was so refreshing to have his word taken at face value that Wash didn’t try regaining the lead.

They reached Connie without further incident, and after a short firefight, the three of them met up with South. Once there were four, they cut a swath through the resistance much faster than they’d been doing on their own. North stayed where he was and guided them, directing them to large groups of rebels and covering them when he could. A few more fires started, only about half of which were Maine’s doing, and Wash got the satisfaction of chucking his purloined grenade into a tight cluster of rebels that were in the process of trying to bring Connie down.

By the time North recalled them to the LZ with a short announcement that Alpha team had completed their objective and were on their way back, Wash’s arm was going numb and he was having a hard time keeping a grip on his rifle. His shoulder was burning something fierce and he felt sweaty and uncomfortable. It was with considerable relief that he climbed into the Pelican and stumbled over to an empty seat.

Maine sat down next to him, but Wash just leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. Adrenaline and discomfort kept him from falling asleep, but concern about what was wrong with his arm and how it would impact his work with the Project occupied his mind for the duration of the trip back to the _Mother of Invention_. The conversations of the others receded into a low buzz of background noise, easily ignored. Once or twice a comment or question was directed his way; when that happened, Wash grunted in acknowledgement or muttered a terse response. He must have gotten the point across eventually, because after a few attempts at drawing him out, they let him alone and he was able to ride out the flight in peace.

As soon as the Pelican landed, he hauled himself to his feet and headed out. _Get the armor off and _ _go_ _ to the med bay_, he thought, crossing the deck and heading for the locker room. It soon became a mantra, the rhythm of the words keeping his feet moving whenever things seemed to go grey and fuzzy at the edges.

_G__et moving_, he told himself firmly when, after one such bout of mental fog cleared, he found himself leaning against the wall going nowhere. _You can’t take care of it standing in the __hallway__._ Something was wrong with him. He knew that. He’d known that before he’d even gotten on the Pelican. But it was too hard to think clearly. He couldn’t figure out what it was, which only added frustration to his sluggish mixture of emotions.

After what felt like hours of grueling effort and mounting aggravation, he staggered into the locker room. Fetching up against his locker, Wash leaned heavily against it and fumbled one-handed at his helmet until he got the thing unlatched.

“Where?” The low demand came from beside him.

Startled, the helmet slipped from Wash’s fingers and hit the floor with a loud, echoing clang. In his mind, he jerked around to face the source of the voice. In reality, his head slowly rolled to the side and like an afterthought, his torso twisted to follow.

At first, all he did was blink. Then, slowly, he tried, “Maine?”

It _was_ Maine standing there, already stripped out of his armor and wearing only the black undersuit. Wash tried to remember if he’d seen him when he walked in, but everything was a hazy blur. He wasn’t even sure how long it had taken him to get there from the Pelican.

Dark eyes narrowing, Maine impatiently jerked his chin at him.

That meant something, Wash was sure of it. The little things Maine did always meant something, even if it seemed like they were random and inconsequential. Armor momentarily forgotten by this latest mystery, Wash squinted up at him.

“The locker room?” he hazarded. That was where they were, wasn’t it? Or had he wandered into the wrong place?

Confused, Wash turned back to his locker and yes, there it was. Plain grey metal with a numberpad and a tag with his name written on it. Not his _real_ name, of course. But the fake one. The _new_ one. Washington.

_What a stupid name._ _Why states? That seems awfully_—

His train of thought was unceremoniously derailed as something bodily turned him around. Once again, he found himself looking at Maine, who had a particularly unpleasant scowl on his face and a firm grip on his shoulders.

“Ow,” Wash protested weakly.

He watched Maine’s gaze scan over him, from his face down across his chest. It paused at each of his shoulders before dipping to his waist, then it dropped further, sliding down his legs. It was a sharp, penetrating look and Wash shifted beneath it. The last time he’d been scrutinized so severely, he’d been shouting. And then he’d punched his CO.

Not good times.

Maine met Wash’s eyes. “Where are you hurt?”

“Oh.” Wash drew the sound out on a long sigh. When nothing further was forthcoming, Maine gave him a tiny shake and the pain in his shoulder flared hotter. “Shoulder!” He leaned to the side, trying to get away from the pressure of his grip. “My shoulder.”

That intense stare shifted to his shoulder. Then, with a low growl, Maine spun him around. It happened so fast that it made him dizzy. Trying to regain his balance, Wash lifted the hand that wasn’t numb and braced himself against the locker. None too soon, either, as Maine began prying off his armor.

Unable to do anything but stand there, Wash concentrated on the important things. Like not letting his knees buckle and deposit him onto the floor. And ignoring the dizziness so he didn’t throw up on himself. He didn’t know how long it took. Things got soft and grey there for a while.

When the world came back, he was facing Maine again. And Maine was glaring at him. “You got shot.”

_Oh._ Wash took a moment to consider this new information. He’d been shot before. A couple times, actually. He’d taken a plasma burst across his back once. Another time, some fucking Grunt had hit him in the leg with one of those crystal needles. None of that had ever felt like this did, though. Much too slowly, it occurred to him that that was because he’d never been shot by a human bullet before. Absurdly, it struck him as funny and he snorted with amusement.

“I guess so.” He twitched his uninjured shoulder in a shrug. “Yeah.”

“You said you were fine.”

Was he angry? Wash blinked in surprise. “Thought I was.”

It was Maine’s turn to snort, but his sounded disgusted. "Med bay." It wasn’t a request.

_ Wow. He’s mad. _

"Yeah," Wash said peevishly. He didn't need to be told to go. He wasn't a child. He'd been intending to go ever since he got off the Pelican. Scowling, he plucked at the material clinging to his arm. "Just gotta..."

_Change_ , he thought, voice trail ing off into nothing. _Put pants on. Real clothes. _That was too much trouble to articulate, however. It was easier just to take the undersuit off. Theoretically, anyway. He looked down at his chest, trying to remember how to get out of it.

Maine made another disgruntled noise, slapped his hand away from himself, and took over undressing him. It was brisk and efficient, with a minimum of fuss. A hand on his hip steadied him as Maine pushed him into stepping out of the suit, then tugged him out of the way so he could open the locker. Wash found himself sitting on the bench in his boxer-briefs one minute, then hoisted onto his feet in a pair of sweatpants in such a dizzying blur of motion that he wasn't really sure what happened.

"Move," Maine ordered, giving him a firm nudge toward the door.

The authority in his voice bypassed the shock and went straight to Wash’s feet. They started moving seemingly of their own volition, carrying Wash along like a passenger in his own body. Maine kept pace with him, stalking along at his side like a bodyguard. He didn't say anything else to him, but every once in a while, when Wash started to list to the side or slowed to a stop, Maine would reach over and take hold of his elbow, steadying him and guiding him onward to their destination.

And Maine stayed there with him, lurking in the doorway, as the medics shot Wash up with fluids and painkillers, took the bullet out of his shoulder, cleaned the blood off of him, and bandaged him up. He didn't remember most of it, but through the haziness of blood loss and shock—grossly exacerbated by the drugs—he caught glimpses of Maine's bulk, standing motionless at a distance that was both out of the way and close enough to keep an eye on him. There was no reason to hold him overnight, the bullet hadn't severed an artery or fractured a bone, so he was discharged with a bottle of pills, a follow-up appointment, and an admonishment to take it easy for the next few days.

Maine followed him out, saying nothing, and wordlessly steered him toward his quarters when Wash started heading the wrong way. He was still there as Wash fumbled open the door. Or maybe Maine took care of it, he wasn’t sure. And after he stumbled into bed, sprawled out on his stomach and already half-asleep by the time his head touched the pillow, the dim memory of a tall, blurry shape accompanied him into unconsciousness.

* * *

**Present Day**

* * *

The _Necessity Is_ was an Anlace-class frigate, heavily modified to remove all offensive capabilities in order to avoid attracting the attention of the Guardians. It wasn’t the largest vessel Emily had ever served on—that honor went to the UNSC _Infinity_, prior to the emergence of the Created—but it had the distinction of being the most specialized. Every centimeter of space not utilized for operational and personnel requirements was devoted to the support and advancement of medical science. State of the art labs and an unparalleled operating suite, treatment equipment and medicine for practically every type of condition a human male might have, and a veritable company of surgeons, specialists, and medical support staff.

All for _one_ patient.

Emily had been on the ship for six months. Although she’d spent the majority of that time in the labs, working on a treatment plan for the moment they took their mysterious patient out of stasis and started on the hard work, she could almost navigate its brightly lit corridors with her eyes closed.

It was thirty meters to the lift that would take her from the recreational deck, where the small cafeteria was located, to the command deck. From there, it was ten meters past the bridge to the unassuming door that led to the suite of rooms that comprised the Director’s office and living quarters. Emily paused there in front of that door—silvery composite alloy, just like every other nonessential door on the ship—and fussed with her clothes, wiping nonexistent wrinkles from her lab coat and straightening the hem of her scrub shirt. She did a quick pass over her hair, smoothing down wayward strands, and then, recognizing that she was stalling, pressed a button on the control panel.

A moment later, the door slid open.

Taking a deep breath, she walked inside, spine straight, shoulders back, head held high. _Exude enough confidence and maybe he’ll believe it. Maybe _ I’ll _ believe it. _

One might expect that the office of the person in charge of an operation as expensive and obviously classified as this one would be extravagant. A visual representation of importance. A constant reminder of both the hierarchy within the project and the subtle, illusory assurance that any obstacle, no matter how large or complicated, could be overcome by visionary leadership.

Nothing could be further from reality.

The room was modest in size, large enough to accommodate half a dozen pieces of furniture. A sturdy, albeit plain desk of moderate size and its accompanying chair, slightly oversized and stuffed to a comfortable-looking degree. A pair of more utilitarian chairs arranged in front of it, clearly meant to give visitors a seat without encouraging them to remain past their welcome. A low sideboard positioned against the wall near the door, upon which sat a decanter of liquor and four glasses, and a bookshelf behind the desk, filled to the brim with actual books and bits of unidentified equipment. Large screens lined the walls, displaying a plethora of information: medical data on the patient, the ship’s flight path, last known locations of the Guardians. And woven through it all was enough space that a man could comfortably pace the length and breadth of the room without bumping into anything.

He was standing behind the desk when she entered, half-turned toward a screen that showed the quadrant through which the frigate was currently cruising. For a moment, with his good side in profile and his attention focused on something else, Emily could admit that he was attractive. Then he turned to face her and discomfort surged fitfully in her stomach.

All things considered, he was technically still a good-looking man. He was tall and fit, and habitually wore well-made suits that complimented the lines of his lean, muscular body without unduly emphasizing or concealing any of them. His hair, a mid-length cut that was too long to be military appropriate but too short to be pulled back from his face, was carefully styled into a deliberately messy off-center part. But nice suits and trendy haircuts couldn’t disguise the scar that marred half of his face.

While the right side was all smooth pale skin and a high cheekbone, the left looked like a shattered pane of glass. Jagged tears splintered out over his cheek and across his forehead, making an uneven, broken hash of his eyebrow and disrupting the symmetry of his mouth. They stretched into his hairline and under his chin, where they disappeared into his always high, always closed collars. One particularly wicked scar ran up his cheek and over his eye socket, the significantly lighter pupil suggesting that even his eyeball had sustained some measure of damage.

Despite having seen him countless times since she’d been hired, Emily had never quite gotten used to it. She’d seen severe Lichtenberg figures burned into human skin before and found even the worst of them eerily beautiful, like strange works of art. But this was no delicate tracery. This was breathtakingly brutal and no matter how often she tried to prepare herself, the sight of him always gave her pause. Sometimes it was a brief glance that lasted a second too long. Sometimes it was outright staring before she caught herself. But it always happened. And he always noticed.

Because he noticed_ everything._

It was just impossible not to wonder about him. Wonder what had happened to him that had left him looking like that. Wonder how he’d survived it. Wonder why in the hell he hadn’t had the scars removed.

Money was clearly no object. If he had the credits to invest in resurrecting a man who might as well be dead, surely a smidgen of that fortune could have been diverted to fix his ruined face. Maybe he wasn’t an extraordinarily vain man, but he obviously cared at least a little about the way he looked. He dressed well. He kept himself neatly groomed; his hair was always combed and styled, his face was always clean shaven. He even wore nice shoes, for Christ’s sake! And for what? A bunch of medical personnel in a closed environment who were too busy doing the impossible to care how anybody looked?

No. Nobody could look like that and not care. It wasn’t possible. There was a reason he hadn’t gotten treatment. There had to be.

She’d done her level best not to stare this time. She’d only focused on the scars for a second. Two at most. But the right side of his mouth still curved upward in a knowing smile and she thought she heard a faint note of amusement in his slightly raspy voice as he greeted her. “Good morning, Doctor Clarke.”

It could have been worse. He could have taken offense to way she looked at him. The way _everyone_ looked at him. But he didn’t. He never had.

“Good morning, sir.”

She didn’t know his name. No one did. That first day, after they’d disembarked from the transports and gathered to meet him, he’d smiled strangely—crooked and just a little too sharp—and introduced himself as the Director, almost like he was making a joke no one present could understand. And that was what they still called him.

There was a carafe and a pair of mugs sitting on the corner of his desk. He gestured to them with his left hand, encased as always in a supple leather glove. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I know it’s early.”

Chuckling softly, she shook her head. "Ah, no thank you. I think I've already had a pot and a half."

A commiserating smile passed briefly over his mouth. "How’s our patient doing?"

"He's stable right now. His vitals are..." She tried and failed to suppress a grimace. "They could be better, but they've improved considerably since earlier this morning. So far, it looks like he's accepting the new lungs. If he doesn't start showing signs of rejection, Doctor Andrews thinks we can try taking him off the ventilator next week."

It was a big _if_. Every time they thought they'd gotten one of the man's organs functioning properly, something happened. A different one failed. An infection set in out of nowhere. His cells started necrotizing. His heart stopped. And then the new organ would fail and they'd have to start all over again.

Judging from the depth of the Director's frown, he shared her pessimism. Those too-sharp mismatched eyes left her as he looked down at the top of his desk and tapped in a sequence. A large holoscreen shimmered to life above it, filling with pages of data. He shifted through them with his bare hand, flicking his first two fingers every time he wanted to change the display.

"I'm not a doctor," he told her absently, attention so focused on the screen that she was hopeful he missed her surprised blink. It was rare to get any personal information out of him. The staff’s general consensus was a solid _unsure_ about whether he’d had medical training. Sometimes he said things that seemed to indicate that he had and sometimes he asked questions so basic that even a med school freshman would have known the answers. "Can you help me make sense of these?"

"Of course." She joined him on the other side of the desk, mindful to keep to his uninjured side. "May I?" she asked, lifting a hand toward the screen.

Waving at it, he stepped back to give her room in front of it. "By all means."

_These_ turned out to be the last two weeks of brain scans. Emily hadn't specialized in neurology, but the activity was so limited that they weren't terribly complicated. She could translate them well enough on her own. The problem was trying to concentrate with him standing behind her. He wasn't crowding her and she couldn’t feel him staring impatiently at the back of her head, but the nape of her neck still prickled in awareness of his proximity and her stomach still twisted into oddly nervous knots.

After a few minutes of heavy silence, he murmured, “There’s no activity, is there?”

She glanced back at him and saw him rubbing his hand over his face, like he was exhausted or sad or had a splitting headache. It was such an intimately hopeless gesture that her heart went out to him and some of her nervousness faded.

Most people suspected that he had history with their patient. He took every setback too personally for the whole thing to be just another UNSC-subsidized experiment or a bid at making a name for himself and his team. And while they appeared to be of similar age, they didn’t look anything alike, the Director’s disfigurement notwithstanding, which greatly reduced the possibility that they were related by blood. That left friends, extended family members, or—by far the most popular theory—lovers.

Both men had clearly suffered massive injuries. Almost unanimous agreement pegged them as former soldiers, either of the Great War or the burgeoning conflict with the Created. Their patient looked like a soldier and the Director carried himself like one. The more romantically minded among the staff had spun the story of comrades at arms falling in love on the front lines and having their affair tragically cut short, perhaps even before they’d managed to see the end of the conflict; one man practically dead and the other grievously wounded yet eschewing his own recovery in the hope of beating the odds and bringing his lover back.

Emily didn't know what she believed, it could have been anything, but looking at him now, with his tight frown and hunched shoulders, it was easy to think that the romantics had the right of it. No matter how ridiculously unrealistic it was.

"It's not much, no," she agreed, though she gentled her voice to deliver the unpleasant news. "But it isn't nothing. And that's important. It means there's still hope."

Not _much_ hope, but she knew that he was well aware of that. There was no sense in rubbing salt into what was clearly a raw, still bleeding wound.

“It’s not enough to bring his body back,” he said softly, meeting her eyes. “_He_ needs to be there, too. Everything that makes him who he is. Otherwise, there’s no point to any of this.”

There it was again. It was fainter than it had been in the operating room last night, just a thin undercurrent in his voice, but there was no mistaking the desperation as he bit off every word like they pained him. And not even all those scars could conceal the way it was etched in his pinched expression.

_ Damn it. I’m going to owe Oliver fifty credits. _He didn’t look it, but Oliver was the biggest proponent of the tragic lovers theory, and like an idiot, she’d bet him that he was wrong.

Emily was so busy musing over her lost wager that she wasn’t monitoring her mouth and was horrified to hear her voice ask, "You love him, don't you?"

It wasn't any of her business. It was _completely_ unprofessional. And they had no relationship to speak of that would make such an intrusive, personal question in any way acceptable.

His eyes widened. "What?"

"I'm so sorry," she stammered, hastening to do damage control before she embarrassed herself—and him—any further. Or got herself fired for grossly overstepping boundaries. "I don't know why I said that. It isn't any of my business. I just—" _Shut up. Stop talking, __you fool!_ But it was like her mouth had a mind of its own and it sympathized a little too deeply with the Director's distress. "I've lost people, too. In the war. And outside of it. If I had the means to bring them back, if there was even the slightest chance of being successful, I'd do everything I could. So I understand. We all do. And we'll do absolutely everything we can to bring him back. I can’t promise much but I can promise you that."

The Director's surprise faded slowly through her unintentional speech, until something softer took its place. She couldn't quite define it. The scars made subtle emotions too difficult to read.

"I lost everything that day," he said quietly, the corner of his mouth twisting briefly in a painful smile. "_Everything._ But I heard things afterward. Rumors. When I checked into them, I noticed things that didn't add up to the official story. Little things, mostly. Details you wouldn't think about twice unless it mattered to you. But I kept searching. Eventually, I found him." He tipped his head sideways, indicating the ship. "That's why we're here. I need him, Doctor Clarke. More than you can possibly imagine."


	3. Chapter 3

"Hey, Wash! You got a minute?"

Already halfway down the corridor, Wash turned and looked back the way he'd come. York was stepping out of the mess, hand raised in a bid for his attention.

"Sure," he called, waiting for him to catch up. "What's up?”

York lifted one shoulder in a casual shrug. "Nothing really. Just wanted to talk to you about something."

His guard went up immediately. York's tone was a little too carelessly casual to be convincing, and even if it had been, his expression of innocent curiosity would have ruined it. The man hadn't been innocent for at least two decades, if he'd ever been at all. And maybe Wash was just being paranoid—it sure as hell wouldn't have been the first time—but it looked like York was up to something and was painfully aware that he wasn't doing a good job of hiding it.

"Okay," he said slowly, arching a skeptical eyebrow.

"It's not really any of my business," York began. _Yep. There it is._ "And you can tell me to fuck off if you want."

Wash sighed heavily, already impatient for the conversation to be over. Nothing that started with _it’s none of my business_ ever ended well. "You gonna tell me what it is or you wanna just keep dancing around it all day?"

With a sheepish chuckle, York ducked his head. “It's just—You and Maine."

_Here we_—_Wait, what?_ Wash shook his head, confused. "What about us?"

"What's going on there?"

"What do you mean?"

York eyed him suspiciously, forehead wrinkling with the intensity of his frown. Wash stared blankly back at him, waiting for clarification, and nearly walked into the wall for his trouble. York must have realized that he wasn't fucking with him because the frown eventually relaxed into uncertainty.

“I mean...” He ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it into a mess, before scratching absently at the back of his neck. _Is he nervous?_ “You two spend a lot of time together.”

It was true. They did. Taking that bullet for the Project—for _Maine_—had changed something between them. In the months following that first mission, their developing friendship had solidified into something well-nigh unbreakable. They spent more time together than they did apart, every day unless one or both of them were busy on separate assignments. And separate assignments didn’t happen much anymore.

Wash had cottoned on to the way the leaderboard was used in team assignments pretty quickly. He’d watched it for a few weeks, tracking the rise and fall of his friends. Once he’d worked out where they spent the majority of their time, he altered his performance in the obvious areas and where the ranking system was more nebulous, emulated their behavior in general. Nine times out of ten now, he and Maine were assigned to the same team, and with how seamlessly they worked together—their almost daily extracurricular training sessions had taught them how to compliment each other in combat—he was expecting it to soon be a full ten.

Carolina was the best Freelancer they had, and from what Wash knew, she'd held the number one slot for just about the entire time she'd been part of the Project. But as a unit, he and Maine were fast becoming a close second.

Prolonged time spent in each other's company also meant that Wash had become significantly more fluent in reading the nuances of Maine's body language. The man could convey whole volumes with a look and a particular quirk of his eyebrow or twist of his mouth. And evidently Wash was inadvertently picking up his habits, because it wasn't wholly unusual for them to carry on whole conversations in silence, with little more than a few pointed looks and some subtle shifts in expression. York called it creepy whenever it happened in front of him and North had taken to smiling tiny, secretive smiles of indeterminate meaning, but Wash thought it was kind of neat.

He'd never had such a deeply comfortable relationship with another person and while he was pretty close to York and North, it wasn't the same. And it wasn't just because he was attracted to Maine. There was something about him that made Wash feel like he'd known him all his life, despite actually knowing very little about him. Maine apparently felt something similar; he deliberately sought out Wash at least as often as Wash sought him out.

After nearly six months, York pointing out how much time they spent together was about as obvious as mentioning water being wet or that the space between the stars was black.

Somehow, Wash managed to scrabble together enough patience to point out reasonably, "So do you and North."

“Well, yeah, but...” York trailed into silence for a moment, then continued firmly, “That’s different.”

Midway through rolling his eyes, he realized what York was circling around. “Are you asking me if we’re fucking?” _How old—Oh, holy shit. _ “Wait. Is this the _Talk?_”

Uncertainty melting into a peculiar kind of horror, York raised his hands in surrender.

“Shit. It is, isn’t it?” He chuckled at the absurdity. “You think we’re fucking and you’re all set to give me some stupid speech about it.”

“That’s not—Look, I’m your friend.” His nosy, meddling friend whose poorly concealed sheepishness was giving him away. “I’m just trying to be a good friend here.”

“Sure you are,” he scoffed. “Which one did you get?”

“What?”

“Speech,” Wash clarified. “Which one did you get? No fraternizing with teammates? Hurt my brother and I’ll shoot you?” He grinned, eyebrows rising. “Or don’t you have any good friends?”

“Man, shut up.” York jabbed an elbow into Wash’s ribs.

“Oh no. You started it. C’mon. Let’s hear it.”

York tried glaring at him, but Wash ignored his piss-poor attempt at intimidation and stared back expectantly. He must have realized it wasn’t a battle he could win; after a few seconds, he huffed in defeat. “Fine. If you must know.”

“I must.”

“I didn’t get a speech. Carolina gave me one of those disapproving stares when I walked into the training room and South made it a point to load her gun beside me.” When Wash failed to react to that information, he added dryly, “Three times. In a day.”

It was so easy to envision that Wash burst out laughing. York gave him a pained frown, but he didn’t stop. The asshole deserved it.

“Don’t be a dick.”

Wash snorted. “You started it.”

“I did not! I just asked—”

"I know this might come as a shock to you, but sex isn't the only thing two people can do together. Really."

York groaned. “Thanks for that. I had no idea.”

“We're all very aware of that.”

Companionable silence settled over them as they continued on their way. Eventually Wash's exasperated amusement gave way to grudging acceptance. It wasn't like it was Price nosing into his business, trying to psychoanalyze him. It was York, his friend. Considering the foot he'd started on, it was probably a good thing that he'd made friendships solid enough to approach him over stupid shit like this.

After a moment, York glanced askance at him and ventured curiously, "So what is it you _do_ do?"

Wash made a face at him. “What else do you and North do? Gotta be something or one of you'd be walking funny by now.”

“Oh my god,” York squawked, theatrically clutching at his chest in mock protest. “Have a little respect for the sanctity of a man’s sex life.”

“Sure, buddy. As soon as you do.”

York blew out a breath. “I just have a hard time imagining the two of you having actual conversations.”

“I’m a little disturbed that you imagine us doing anything. Does North know?”

“I’m serious!”

“We talk all the time,” Wash relented, shrugging. “We watch vids. Play cards. Workout. Spar. I don’t know, normal shit. We’re _friends_, York.”

“You talk all the time,” York parroted back slowly, unconvinced.

“You’re being an asshole again.”

“Did you forget I’ve known the guy longer than you? He doesn’t talk.”

Wash frowned. “I wouldn’t talk to anybody either if this was the shit I had to deal with.”

“We don’t give him shit!”

Wash didn’t say anything, just stared at him until York looked away with a sigh.

“All right,” he admitted. “We give him a little shit. We all give each other shit, you know that.”

To show he wasn't harboring any hard feelings, Wash gave him a conciliatory pat on the shoulder. “Look, I appreciate the concern, but you don’t have to big brother me or whatever you're trying to do. I’m not that much younger than you. You realize that, right? I’m thirty-four. I can handle myself.”

York laughed. “You sure about that? You didn’t lie on your enlistment papers?”

As the corridor branched in three different directions, Wash gave him a shove toward the nearest one that wouldn’t take him down to the locker room. “Take your routine on the road, Mister Comedian.”

“That’s Lieutenant Comedian to you, rookie.”

“You wish."

He got about three steps away before York called out to him. “Hey, Wash!”

Sighing, he glanced over his shoulder, bracing for more dumb jokes. “What?”

“We’re going to play poker tonight after class. Wanna come?”

"Can't." His mild regret wasn't feigned. Freelancer poker games could get pretty cutthroat and even when he lost all his credits, he never failed to have fun. "Promised Maine I’d help him test out his rifle. Next time?”

Too late, he realized he'd just given York an opening, but surprisingly, he didn't take it. "Well, if you get done early, you’re both welcome to drop by. I think Carolina's aiming to take me for everything I've got after last week.”

“Thanks, man.” For the invite _and_ for refraining from the dick jokes it was probably killing him not to make. From the way he grinned at him, York read his meaning clearly. “I’ll say something to him.”

Lifting his hand goodbye, Wash turned and continued on his way. Low-level amusement over the whole thing persisted through most of the day, striking at random moments and forcing him to bite back a smile or stifle a chuckle. It just figured that he'd get accused of doing the one thing he _wasn't_ doing with Maine. And not for lack of desire on his part. Had he sensed even the slightest hint of interest, he would've jumped on the opportunity. Quite literally. But although he'd looked for it—more frequently in the past than he did now; he'd largely made peace with the reality that his one-sided crush was precisely that—Wash never noticed any signs of mutual attraction.

There were no surreptitious glances in the locker room while they were changing or touches that lingered a few seconds too long. No inappropriate erections pressed into Wash's hip or thigh whenever an intense bout of sparring devolved into vicious wrestling on the training room floor. Nothing that could have been interpreted as a flirtatious remark or an innuendo-laden joke ever passed through Maine's lips.

Nice as it would’ve been to have had someone to fuck, it wasn’t the end of the world. Wash could take care of himself just fine when the urge struck and he was grateful for what he had. Wanting more didn’t mean that he_ needed_ more to be happy. And unless he was keeping secrets, Maine wasn’t interested in anyone else, either, which meant Wash didn’t have to deal with envy or jealousy threading resentment into what was as close to an ideal relationship as he knew he was ever going to get.

But damned if it wasn’t ridiculous that people actually thought something was happening when it wasn’t. Maybe even just a _tiny_ bit annoying, too, though for the sake of his mood, Wash resolutely ignored that and focused on the hilarity.

He was still thinking about it later that night when he met up with Maine on the training deck. As it turned out, the new rifle was not in fact a traditional one. It was a large directed-energy weapon that looked more like a portable cannon than a firearm. Wash had encountered a few of the things during the war; massive, unwieldy weapons that could blow up a Wraith or a Phantom or mow down a whole group of Brutes with a single charge.

Maine picked the thing up like it weighed no more than a battle rifle—even though it probably weighed close to six times that much—and swung it around with ease. He took it through a dozen combat maneuvers, ducking and weaving against imaginary enemies to get the feel for it. Wash offered to stand in as a real enemy but Maine waved him off with a terse “used one of these before.”

Ordinarily, Wash would have probably taken at least a little offense at getting brushed off like that. If he was in the way, what the hell was he even doing there? It wasn’t like Maine needed moral support to test a weapon. But just as the dismissal started to rankle, the actual words penetrated his brain. Maine had used one before.

Wash had never used one. None of the marines he’d served with had used one. He’d never even been trained on the things. The only time he’d seen one fired, it had been in the hands of an ODST; the guy had nailed a Banshee mid-barrel roll with that searingly bright red beam of energy and incinerated it. Apparently, the UNSC considered them “way too fucking expensive” for use by rank and file marines. Only the elitest of the elite could get their hands on them.

And Maine had.

Despite how close they'd gotten, Wash still didn't really know anything about his life prior to Project Freelancer. Maine didn’t talk about it and out of respect for his privacy, Wash hadn’t asked. As far as he knew, there was no explicit rule forbidding them from talking about who they’d been, but there seemed to be some kind of unspoken agreement among the Freelancers that no one asked. Sometimes personal information was volunteered, like when York told him a humorous story about a disastrous date he’d gone on in his former life and or North's occasional remark about his childhood with South, but nobody pressed for more details or asked intrusive questions.

All Wash knew was what he’d been able to surmise. Maine’s physique, knowledge of military-grade weaponry and equipment, and skill in combat pointed to his having been a soldier. The sheer number of scars on what he’d seen of his body suggested that he’d been in combat, because they weren’t all those strange razor-straight, surgically precise lines. There were jagged punctures, plasma burns, and obvious shrapnel wounds. And now there was this new piece of his past to add to the puzzle: he knew how to use M6 G/GNRs.

Had he been an ODST? Wash wasn’t an expert on Helljumpers, but he’d met a few of them. They were a fearless, savage bunch, maybe a little crazy but stubborn as hell. They went into situations that others fled and they held lines even marines couldn’t. They were the best, the pinnacle of a soldier’s career. The only thing better than having an ODST on a mission was having a Spartan, and Spartans were so rare they were practically fairytales.

Maine could have _definitely_ been an ODST.

_Could’ve been a Spartan too,_ he thought idly, watching him perform a complicated aerial maneuver with that twenty-kilo gun that Wash probably couldn’t have pulled off even in the armor that augmented his strength and speed. _Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing? _

Unlikely, though. Practically impossible. The Covenant was still a threat. The fucking Insurrectionists were still a threat. If the point of Project Freelancer was to create an elite force of soldiers—not quite as powerful or incredible as their superhuman counterparts, but making up for that deficit in numbers—that was cheaper and faster to train than Spartans, it wouldn’t make any sense to actually _have_ a Spartan. They were too valuable to the UNSC, the war effort, and humanity to spare.

No, if Maine had been anything other than a marine, he'd been an ODST. And that was pretty fucking impressive.

By the time he called it quits on his workout, Wash had come up with dozens of questions and no idea how to subtly work any of them into a conversation. He knew he could just ask. Maine was a pretty direct guy, and direct people tended to appreciate that same kind of forthrightness in others. But he also didn’t want to put him off. Or disappoint him. Or make him less inclined to talk than he already was. If he wanted to be a good friend, he knew that he needed to not be a nosy asshole.

They already had one of those. The _Mother of Invention _wasn’t large enough for two.

It was still relatively early in the night when they left the locker room, Wash’s hair damp from the quick shower he’d taken. He hadn’t done much of anything except stand around and watch Maine play with his new toy, but Maine had worked up enough of a sweat to need one and he hadn’t wanted to just lurk around in the locker room while he waited for him to get done. Only now that he was clean and fresh-shaven, it seemed like a waste to go back to his quarters and go to bed.

As the door closed behind them, Wash glanced up at Maine. “York said if we’re not too busy fucking, we can drop by his quarters for poker with the usual suspects.”

Maine looked at him, his face unreadable. “He said that.”

Wash smiled, ignoring the question in that flat comment. “Yep.” If York wanted to be a pest, he had absolutely no problem cheerfully tossing him under the bus. “I told him that I’m usually too wiped out after, but I’d run it by you anyway.”

That nonexpression didn’t change, but a faint note of exasperation crept into his voice. “Wash.”

Wash briefly considered playing dumb and making him actually ask for the whole story, but decided it wasn’t worth it. “York tried to give me some kind of big brother talk earlier today. Figured all the time we spend together means we’re fucking. Dunno who he thought was going to hurt who. I laughed at him and told him to mind his own business, but if you want to drop in and fuck with him...”

The corner of Maine’s mouth twitched. “Won’t believe it. Next time.”

And there was another reason he liked Maine. The guy had a wicked sense of humor and he wasn't afraid to have fun with it. His willingness to mess with York just endeared him to Wash that much further.

Grinning, he jerked his head in the direction of their rooms. “You wanna do anything else or call it a night?”

“Got some whiskey.”

He said it like a statement, but Wash recognized the offer and nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

Comfortable silence accompanied them on the short walk, and once there, Maine went to a storage cabinet on the far side of the room to retrieve the bottle while Wash kicked off his shoes and took a seat on the edge of the bed. He’d just located the remote for the vidscreen when Maine returned and gave him a wordless nudge toward the other side of the bed. Heaving his most put-upon sigh, Wash repositioned himself and soon they were sitting side by side against the wall, the bottle wedged between his thigh and Maine’s and some action movie he didn’t know the name of playing on the screen across from them.

Within the first five minutes, they realized it was a terrible movie and started taking small sips of whiskey every time the dialogue made one of them cringe or an improbably dressed woman tottered through the scene on ridiculous heels. Within an hour, half the bottle was gone and Wash was wishing he would have had the foresight to bring along some snacks to soak up the alcohol.

Tipping his head sideways until it touched Maine’s shoulder, Wash blinked slowly up at him. “You don’t have anything to eat in here, do you?”

Pausing with the bottle a centimeter or two from his mouth, Maine cocked an amused glance at him. “Drunk?”

“No.” That wasn’t a lie. “On the way, though.”

Maine took such a long drink that Wash got distracted by the bob of his throat as he swallowed. He was still staring when Maine lowered the bottle and screwed the top back on. Even almost sloshed, the meaning of that was obvious.

“Uh uh.” He made a grab for it, but Maine pulled it out of reach and his fingertips only brushed the glass. “Oh, c’mon.”

Without a word, Maine set it down on his other side. He was so broad that it might as well have been on the other end of the room. Wash started to reach for it anyway, gave up halfway there, and let his hand fall onto Maine’s forearm. “Seriously. ‘S fine.”

“Later.”

Wash scowled at him, unable to interpret the nuance of that decision. Later tonight after the slightly sloppy buzz had worn off? Or later some other night? Maine did not appear suitably chastised by the scowl, and after a few seconds, he looked back at the shitty movie like he had every intention of ignoring further protests.

_Bastard. _ Somewhere between grudgingly noticing how nice Maine’s cheekbone was in profile and recognizing that he shouldn’t be thinking about how attractive any part of him was with almost a quarter of a bottle of whiskey seeping through his blood, Wash became aware that he was staring blankly at his— _very nice and very muscular_—forearm. Specifically, at one of the thin scars that ran along the length of it. He followed it with his eyes, over a thick cord of muscle until it terminated near his elbow. Another scar picked up a few centimeters beyond it and stretched up over his bicep to his shoulder.

It wasn’t the first time Wash had seen the scars or Maine’s arm in its entirety. It wasn’t even the first time he'd been sitting so close to him. But maybe because he was mindlessly staring or the alcohol was drowning out the background noise of his thoughts or his musings in the training room had rattled something loose, he saw the faint unevenness of Maine’s skin. From his elbow down, it was subtly smoother and lighter than what was above the elbow. Even the scars looked different, almost like the one on his upper arm was older than the one on his forearm.

“This isn’t from a fight, is it?” Wash’s mouth moved and Wash’s voice spoke through the pregnant pause between the movie’s bland antihero and his one-dimensional love interest, but Wash didn’t realize he’d asked the question until Maine glanced over at him and lifted a dark eyebrow in a silent bid for elaboration.

_Shit. _That was bad, wasn’t it? He’d asked a personal question that he wasn’t supposed to ask because... Alcohol made the reasoning that was meant to follow hazy. Because he was a Freelancer and Freelancers weren’t supposed to exist outside the Project? Because no one else asked questions so he couldn’t either?

Maine was still looking at him, obviously waiting for an answer. If Wash wasn’t supposed to ask, Maine would’ve shut him down, right? Told him to fuck off and mind his own business? But he hadn’t, so it must have been all right. Maybe he was overthinking it.

_The hell with it. _Wash decided to quit thinking. Since his mouth had gotten him into this mess, it could get him out of it. “The lines are too straight. Too symmetrical. And your left arm.” Seemingly of its own volition, his forefinger traced the edge where dark skin met subtly darker skin. “The skin’s different here too. Rougher. Darker.” His finger slid down to rest atop the center of Maine’s forearm. “You lost this, didn’t you?”

If it bothered him that Wash was prying into his personal life, he certainly didn’t act like it. Didn't act like he minded the touching, either. All he did was nod.

So Wash kept going. “What happened to you?”

A crooked half-smile briefly turned up the corner of Maine’s mouth. “Which time?”

“Jesus Christ.”

The muscles beneath his finger shifted. Maine was flexing his fingers. “Lost it on Sigma Octanus Four.” As Wash stared at him, he added, “A Hunter.”

“Sigma Oct—Wait. We _won _that one.”

Maine nodded again.

Humanity hadn’t won many battles against the Covenant. Not before the Spartans. Not after their creation, either. Certainly not unless they were involved somehow. But humans had won at Sigma Octanus IV. Côte d'Azur had been destroyed, along with a number of other major cities, but the planet hadn't been glassed. It remained under UNSC control.

Because there had been Spartans there.

Wash met Maine's eyes, the growing suspicion that he'd made the wrong assumption about his friend's past burning most of the muzzy haze off of his thoughts. Maine said nothing, his expression neutral and open. Waiting, Wash knew, for whatever else he wanted to ask.

"What about these?" He ran his finger along the ridge of one of those too-neatly formed scars.

"Long time ago."

"How long?"

The tiny almost-smile twitched again at Maine's mouth. "You want the date?"

"You know it?"

"March ninth, 'twenty-five."

Wash wracked his brain for the significance of the date, but nothing came to mind. The Great War had officially started on February 11, 2525. Everyone knew that. But a month afterward? He had no idea. Wash had only been six at the time, too young to pay attention to galactic news. As he'd gotten older, his teachers and eventually the UNSC had drilled date after date and the names of important battles into his memory, but never that one. He couldn't remember _anything_ of note happening that month.

But something clearly had. Proof of it was inscribed along the length and breadth of Maine's body. It had made such a lasting impression that he recalled the specific day it occurred, even though he appeared to be relatively close in age to Wash.

"What was it?" he asked, even though the answer was sitting right in front of him and he could not longer pretend that he didn't know.

Evidently Maine saw it in his eyes, because he arched an eyebrow. "You know."

And there it was. "I didn't know," Wash said quietly. "Not for sure."

The shoulder upon which he was leaning shifted. "Now you do."

A Spartan. A real honest-to-god motherfucking superhero. Sitting there beside Wash watching a shitty movie and drinking booze like a normal person.

"How did you end up _here_?" He probably wasn't supposed to ask that either. Not just because of the unspoken Freelancer rules, but because of the UNSC laws that classified Spartan-related information and relegated public knowledge to rumors, propaganda, and the occasional dumbfounded eye-witness account of a surviving soldier or civilian. But he'd been breaking rules left and right that night. One more couldn't hurt anything.

And Maine really didn't seem to care. "Had a mission on Gamma Station. During the attack on Reach. Took a needle to my T-PACK. Explosion blew me out into space." Just when Wash thought that was all Maine was going to say on the matter, he added, "Last I heard, I'm still MIA."

There was no way that the Director had stolen a Spartan right out from underneath the UNSC. No fucking way. "They don't know?"

Maine grunted, the vocal equivalent of an unconcerned shrug. "Director found me. Rehabilitated me. Figured I could be more useful here."

_Useful? _Wash's eyes narrowed, disliking the possible insinuation. If there was some agreement between the Director and the higher-ups in the UNSC, that was one thing. But if they had no clue, if one of the Director's agents had found him and just appropriated him like so much abandoned equipment, then everybody who ever knew him still thought he was missing. Or dead. Did he have family? Friends? Surviving teammates? Reach had fallen years ago, but he was still MIA? At least with a KIA designation, his friends and family would have gotten closure.

"That you talking or the Director?"

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters!" Wash glared at him, struggling against the potent mixture of irritation and alcohol-induced dullness to find the right words to adequately express why.

Maine breathed out a heavy sigh. "We're weapons, Wash. Not people."

Irritation spiked into real anger. "That’s—_What?_ Are you serious right now?" Of course he was serious. Maine's demeanor and delivery were too matter-of-fact for it to be anything else. "That’s bullshit! Of course you’re a fucking _person_."

"Not supposed to be," Maine replied, the epitome of supreme indifference.

For a long moment, incandescent rage and breathless disbelief strangled Wash into silence. _He believes it. He actually fucking _ believes _ it!_ Because that was what the Director told him? Or had the people who'd turned him into a Spartan instilled that in him? His ignorance about the Spartans and how they'd come to be was as frustrating as Maine's blithe acceptance of his lack of self-worth.

The instant the swell of fury receded enough to let him speak, Wash snapped, "I was _supposed_ to let my whole platoon die because my staff sergeant was a goddamn coward. So the UNSC can go fuck itself."

After a short silence, Maine snorted and turned to the movie. Wash stared at his profile, watching the light from the vidscreen play across his eye. When it became obvious that he wasn’t going to look back at him, Wash gave up and focused on the screen too. His buzz was gone and the last bits of fuzziness were fading fast, leaving him unsettled and agitated. It was the way Maine had said that. Like it didn’t bother him at all. Like even he didn’t consider himself as a person, so it never occurred to him to think anything else.

Wash wasn’t willing to let it stand.

“I heard stories,” he murmured casually, eyes on the screen. “We all did. But I never met a Spartan before. Never knew anyone who did.” _There’s so much I don’t know, _he didn’t say, but he thought maybe Maine heard him anyway.

“Disappointed?”

“No.” Wash snorted derisively, unable to pretend to humor him. “That’s a stupid fucking question.”

“Doesn’t bother you?”

“What?”

“Me.”

Frowning, Wash slanted a glance at him but his face was smooth and relaxed, expressionless. “No. Why would it?”

Maine shrugged.

The sideways glance became a full-on stare. It didn’t draw Maine’s eyes away from the movie neither one of them was actually watching at that point, but Wash didn’t look away. “Do you think it should?”

He got another shrug in response, but this one was a _little_ too careless. A _little_ too disinterested and detached. _Yes_ , that shrug meant. _Yes_, Maine thought he ought to be bothered by him. Disappointed in him.

“Yeah?” Eyes narrowing to slits, Wash hauled off and elbowed him viciously in the side. “Well, you can go fuck yourself too.”

Maine laughed, a low, rumbling chuckle that Wash felt along his arm as much as he heard it. Temptation to elbow him again was strong, but Wash only shook his head in mock disgust. He hadn’t been joking and he was mostly sure that Maine knew it.

“The others really don’t know?”

This disinterested shrug was genuine. “Never told 'em. Maybe they guessed. Maybe not. Doesn’t matter what they think.”

Curiosity and an inability to leave well enough alone prompted Wash to ask, before he could stop himself, “It matter what I think?”

That finally got him to look away from the movie. A crooked smile quirked his mouth. “That what you want?”

Yes, it was. But what he wanted was significantly less important than what Maine wanted. Wash had had a lifetime of choices behind him. Some might have been made under duress, like joining the UNSC—would he have done that if it hadn't been for the war?—or accepting the invitation to Project Freelancer when he hadn’t had any other viable alternative, but ultimately, he could have said no and damn the consequences. The way Maine talked about himself, he had never had that luxury.

"Asking you, Maine."

He exhaled with just enough force to qualify as a snort. "Maybe."

Wash side-eyed him, hearing too much in that single word and needing to know what was real and what he was imagining. "Maybe?"

With a deep, gravelly chuckle, Maine slung his arm around Wash's shoulders and drew him in until he was pressed firmly against him. "Yeah. Maybe."

_Maybe_ he wasn't imagining anything after all. _ I’ll be damned._ Laughing helplessly, unable to find the words he wanted and not convinced that he needed to say them in any case, Wash turned his head, muffling the sound against Maine's chest. A moment later, he felt the light weight of something coming to rest against the top of his head. Maine's hand, he assumed, until a puff of breath disturbed a few strands of his hair. _Oh, hell._

Silence settled over them, Wash relaxing into his sideways sprawl against Maine's chest and Maine's arm a pleasant weight on his shoulders, and they stayed like that as the idiotic movie blundered toward its equally idiotic conclusion. Wash wasn’t paying attention to it. He was too busy listening to the strong rhythm of Maine's heartbeat and feeling his slow, even breaths as they ghosted through his hair and rose and fell beneath him. It was steady, grounding, _real_.

He closed heavy-lidded eyes, blocking out the distraction of the movie. In the darkness, the sound of Maine's heartbeat seemed louder. More encompassing. He let himself sink into it, deeper and deeper until it was the only thing he knew.

"Wash." Something nudged him, a gentle jostle that roused him up out of the dark.

Opening his eyes, he blinked a few times until his vision cleared and lifted his head. The vidscreen was dark. So was the room, the only light coming from the faint glow of the control console on the other side of the bed. Which, Wash realized, he could see as clearly as he did because he was half-sprawled on top of Maine's chest, his arm casually thrown over his stomach.

Licking dry lips, he made a valiant attempt at responding with something coherent. Unfortunately, all that came out was a rough croak. "Huh?"

Being a Spartan evidently meant not being affected by alcohol, because Maine's eyes were too bright and alert for how much he'd had to drink. "Mission." Fingertips drummed lightly against Wash's back, drawing his attention to the hand resting between his shoulder blades. "Just got the message."

"What time is it?"

"Oh five hundred."

That woke him up more than the conversation. He'd assumed he'd just dozed off. Not that he'd spent the whole damn night. Wash started to sit up, only to encounter the unyielding obstacle of Maine's arm. "Why didn't you wake me up?" _And throw my ass out._

For a man who'd been called in to work by his boss, Maine exhibited a noticeable lack of urgency to get moving. "Didn't want to."

"Oh." Mind unhelpfully blank, Wash looked at him and Maine looked back, expression even and a little bland, like he was patiently waiting for him to catch the fuck up. It took a few seconds, but eventually, the significance of the conversation from last night crashed into the reality of the present. "_Oh_."

The control console beeped.

Maine glanced at it and tapped Wash's back again. "C'mon." The warm weight of his hand and arm disappeared. "They want us both."

Slightly hungover and distracted was _not_ how Wash wanted to arrive for a mission briefing. Groaning, he sat up and ran his fingers through his hair. No queasiness, thank fuck, but there was a faint throb behind his eyes that warned of a miserable headache if painkillers and water were not quickly acquired. _Can't get fired already. Haven’t even been here a year._ Plus, if he washed out of the Project, he didn't know what the hell he was going do. The UNSC wasn't going to want him. His family thought he was dead. And he wasn't really sit behind a desk and shuffle papers material.

And Maine was here. That was motivation enough to get his head out of his ass and get moving, instead of sitting there like a dazed idiot.

"Right." Dragging himself to his feet, Wash made his way around the bed and almost walked into the bottle of water Maine shoved in his direction. _Of course he's already ready to go._ He backed up half a step, trying to clear his head with a brief shake, and took it with a mumbled, "Thanks."

Their eyes met as he brought it to his mouth and for a moment—a strangely timeless moment heavy with an electrifying kind of tension—they just looked at each other. Frustration spiked in Wash, then subsided into restless anticipation as Maine ever so slightly cocked his eyebrow. There was a world of meaning in that tiny gesture, more than he could decipher, but what he could read was simple. _Later_.

Chugging half the bottle, Wash passed it back. He could pick up another and the painkillers on the way. Maine drained it in two gulps, tossed it over his shoulder onto the bed, and herded Wash out the door.

"Wanna take bets on how much of a shitshow this one's going to be?" he offered, shoving thoughts of after the mission out of his mind and trying to get his head in the game so there would actually _be_ an after.

"Just try not to get shot."

_Oh for fuck's sake. _ "That was _one_ time."

Maine snorted, the disbelief so thick it was almost tangible.

"Maybe _you_ should try not to blow everything up for once, huh?"

Forgoing direct acknowledgement of the jab, Maine simply radiated an odd combination of innocence and smugly judgmental pleasure.

It was too early in the morning for this. Wash scowled at him. It had no effect whatsoever. "You're such an asshole."

The bastard just chuckled in agreement, a low rumble that immediately sank under Wash's skin and seemed hellbent on taking up residence in his bones. Of all the shitty timing, this had to be the shittiest. _Just focus on the mission. It can wait. _ You _ can wait._

Maine’s self-satisfaction, however, couldn’t be ignored. He would be insufferable all damn day if something wasn’t done to rein it in. There was only one thing for it. Wash threw down the gauntlet. “Twenty credits say we end up pulling more slugs out of_ your_ armor than mine.”

“Deal.” Maine smirked at him, erasing the minuscule sense of triumph Wash felt at getting a rise out of him.

_Fuck._ That expression told him all he needed to know about who was going to lose the bet. _Guess I deserve it. Just _ _have to_ _ hope I don't get my dumb ass killed._

* * *

Technically, no one lost the bet. Of course, no one _won_ it either.

It was a relatively straightforward operation. A group of Insurrectionists had scavenged a piece of highly classified UNSC equipment from a partially glassed planet and the Director had volunteered to send in Freelancers to recover it. There were six agents split into two groups: York, Wash, and Florida were tasked with infiltration and Carolina, Maine, and South Dakota were in charge of running interference until the objective was safely delivered to the LZ.

Taking down Insurrectionists was all well and good, but with the Covenant blowing up ships and destroying planets left and right, Wash was itching to be deployed against them. It wasn’t until their transport was descending to the colony world’s surface that he realized that that probably wasn’t going to happen any time soon. If ever. Project Freelancer was proving effective at curtailing the Insurrection's expansion without requiring additional military resources. The UNSC would be damn foolish to redirect their attention elsewhere. This was probably the type of thing they’d be doing for the rest of his career, nominally under the oversight of the UNSC yet far more easily disavowed than their ONI, Spartan, or ODST counterparts if any of the missions went sideways.

He waited to feel disturbed or conflicted or _something_ by the revelation, but nothing surfaced. Even the slight hesitance he’d felt that first time he’d gunned down a fellow human had long since disappeared. These days, he didn’t feel any reservations whatsoever. An enemy was an enemy. The color of their blood didn’t matter.

His viscerally unpleasant reaction to riding in Pelican bays had lessened considerably over the past few months as well. Whether the sheer number of flights he'd been forced to take was desensitizing him to whatever it was that bothered him or his brain was making more positive associations now that the trips didn't result in gruesome death or dismemberment was unclear and he didn't bother delving into it to figure it out. It was enough that his stomach no longer roiled so violently and he didn't break out in a cold sweat anymore.

All in all, Wash was feeling pretty good about his life and his place in the Project when they landed in a secluded area a short distance from the enemy compound. He traded a few good-natured jabs with York, reminded Maine that he was going to owe him twenty credits when the job was done with more confident than he felt, and gave the departing team a jaunty wave when the time came to part ways.

Approximately fifteen minutes later, it all went to shit.

It was never entirely clear what the _actual_ catalyst was: York tripping an alarm he hadn’t been aware of when he was unlocking the vault where the equipment was being stored, South getting separated from her team and brazenly sauntering into a group of Insurrectionists so large that she couldn’t take them all out before one ran to get reinforcements, or Maine mistaking a sonic grenade for a stun grenade in the heat of the moment and chucking it at a bunch of guards standing too close to the compound’s power generator. In the moment, Wash was crouched behind a hastily pushed together barricade of desks, trading fire with two men hiding on the other side of the doorway while York fought with the lock on the vault and Florida did something to the network from a computer terminal. And between one of York’s muttered curses and Wash reaching down to grab a fresh magazine for his rifle, the whole goddamn world exploded.

_Everyone_ was yelling. The guards, his team, the _other _team through the comms. Wash levered himself onto his elbow, trying to shake the disorientation away and unearth himself from broken pieces of furniture and ceiling tiles and figure out what the hell had happened. Emergency lighting had come on, flashing red lights that cast weird shadows over everything and made it difficult to see properly. A quick scan of the nearby Freelancers threw positive information onto Wash’s HUD: stable life sighs and no serious injuries.

Carolina’s strained voice cut through the din, demanding a sitrep and confirmation that their objective hadn’t been destroyed. York picked himself up off the floor, wrestled the busted door open, and entered the vault. Wash concentrated on the front of the room, one eye on the doorway and the other on his motion trackers, looking for the guards. They were still out there, but they hadn’t resumed trying to kill them and he didn’t want to give them the opportunity. He crept toward the door, picking his way across the debris-strewn floor as silently as possible.

In the background, he could hear the other Freelancers. York, reporting that the team was alive and mobile, the stolen equipment appeared to be in one piece, and they were going to secure it now. Florida, confirming that the network was down and likely the main power along with it. Carolina, informing them all that the west side of the compound was gone, nothing but molten slag and charred ground. And South, yelling that there was an incoming Vulture and it didn’t look friendly.

“Where the fuck did they get a _Vulture_?” York snapped, loud enough to momentarily distract Wash from his inexorable slide into worry as his brain caught up with all the input it was receiving. And what it wasn't.

He hadn’t heard Maine’s voice. Not once since the explosion had rocked the area. His last known coordinates had put him in a very westerly direction. And apparently everything over there was _gone_.

Wash checked the IFF tags as he swung around the doorway and stepped out into the corridor. Maine’s wasn’t there.

The guards, however, were right in front of him. One was sitting against the wall surrounded by broken bits of debris, evidently injured, and the other was lurking nearby, presumably keeping watch. He wasn’t very good at it. Wash took him out first with two shots fired in quick succession to the forehead. A bullet to the throat took out the injured guard before his companion had finished toppling to the floor.

Wash switched to a private comm channel as he surveyed the rest of the corridor. “Maine? Where the fuck are you? Answer me.”

No response. Not even the silent blip of an indicator to acknowledge that he’d heard him.

Nothing changed as they hauled the crate of whatever the hell they’d been sent to retrieve out of the vault or through the damaged corridors toward the exit. No indicators, no additional IFF tags, no comments from the other team. The Vulture was laying covering fire, pinning Carolina and South down and preventing either of them from making their way to the second team. Wash wanted to demand answers, felt the words clawing at his throat like a trapped animal, but with such an immediate threat, he knew neither of them could spare the time to talk to him. And he was busy too. York might have been lugging the cargo, but Wash and Florida had to escort him through the maze of flickering lights, damaged architecture, and Insurrectionists teetering on the unpredictable edge between desperation and triumph.

By the time they exited the compound, Wash's face hurt from how tightly he was clenching his jaw and he'd passed beyond agitated concern straight into cold fury. Unfortunately, there weren't any visible targets upon which he could vent it. Instead of finding the grounds crawling with Insurrectionists waiting to pick them off, the area in front of them was eerily empty. And no wonder, with the Vulture hovering in the air above the building. The roof's overhang prevented them from seeing it, but they could hear the roar of its engine as soon as they slipped outside.

"All right, now what?" York drawled into the open channel. "We make a run for it and hope they don't see us?"

Carolina started speaking, but Wash stopped listening. He stared down at the battle rifle in his hands, silently running a tally of his remaining ammunition. The counter on his display showed that he had half a clip left for the rifle and two for his pistol. The pistol was useless, but the rifle had a range of nine hundred meters and eighteen bullets.

"I got it."

It was only after the channel went completely silent that Wash realized the low growl belonged to him.

"Come again?" York asked.

"Wash?" came South's bark of amused disbelief. "You can't take down a Vulture."

Four IFF tags glowed on his HUD, two beside him, one about a hundred meters away and another much further: York, Florida, Carolina, South Dakota. The rage spiraled down, colder and colder until everything turned to ice. Then he was moving, darting out from beneath the roof and heading for the small building thirty meters to the north.

"_Wash!_” York yelled after him. “What the fuck are you doing?"

"Holy shit. Rookie's got balls after all."

He tuned them out, then closed the comm for good measure. The others weren't stupid. They'd make the most out of the diversion, regardless of their surprise. Because the gunship's gunner had definitely spotted him. Alarms went off across his HUD and Wash jerked to the side, running in a haphazard zigzag as bullets tore into the ground around him.

_Almost there. Almost there. Almost there._ It repeated itself like a mantra, in time with his pounding footsteps, as he neared the building. The door was closed. There was no cover. But there was a window. One window with a pane of something that he was banking on being breakable. His legs were burning and his chest was aching, but he pushed it down, ignored the pain like he was ignoring the warnings flashing across his field of vision and the steady stream of autocannon fire pelting the air and the possibility that the Vulture was equipped with missiles. _Almost there. Almost there. Almost_—

Wash launched himself at the window, diving into—diving _through_ the glass and tucking into a roll that took him across the concrete floor. He twisted sideways as gunfire tore through the window and punched into the opposite wall, getting out of bullets' path and hoping like hell the outer wall was reinforced enough that it could take a little damage. Back fetching up against it beside the window, Wash took a deep breath as he readied the rifle, then exhaled and spun onto his knees, bringing the scope up to his eye and sighting the pilot's head through the clear cockpit shield in one fluid motion. He pressed the trigger, holding it in as the rifle kicked and emptied the clip.

As the shield cracked and the pilot jerked back against his seat, something came flying through the air and slammed into side of the Vulture. The gunship lurched, the force of the collision and the pilot's loss of control sending it into a downward spin. Bullets sprayed wildly, missing the window and Wash by a wide margin. He barely noticed, too busy reorienting the scope to find out what the hell had just happened. Even when he focused on the ship again, it took a moment for his brain to accept what he was seeing.

Maine, armor streaked with soot and visor cracked, was hauling himself up onto the top of the Vulture. When he reached it, he crawled over to the cockpit, seemingly unconcerned that it was veering toward the ground, and slammed his fist into the shield. Already fractured from Wash's bullets, it broke and Maine dropped a grenade into the hole. Without a second's hesitation, he launched himself into the air.

There was nowhere to go and nothing to break his fall. Wash tracked the arc of his descent through the scope in dumbfounded shock, unable to form words or move more than what was necessary to keep him in sight. He could barely even breathe. Maine hit the ground at about the same time as a thunderous boom swept over the area and rocked the building Wash was standing in. The acrid, overpowering smell of a multitude of things on fire hit his nose a moment later.

Vaulting over the windowsill, Wash took off, ignoring the burning remains of the Vulture and the building into which it had crashed. He didn't think about the status of the mission or his other teammates. He didn't consider the possibility that any surviving Insurrectionists could come out of hiding now that there wasn't a chance they'd get hit by friendly fire and start shooting. He was too focused on reaching his friend and making sure that he'd survived the fall.

Only dimly monitoring his surroundings, Wash rounded a corner and pulled up short at the unexpected sight of a person moving toward him. A large person. Wearing dirty armor and holding the remains of a helmet in his hand.

_You son of a bitch_. Wash opened his mouth to shout at him, but the chaotic whirl of fear, anger, relief, and concern choked him into silence.

Blood trickled down the side of Maine's face from a laceration on his forehead, near where his hairline would have been had it not all been shaved off. There were smudges of dirt and soot on his skin and his lower lip was split. He was walking evenly, his posture straight and sure, but Wash wasn't willing to trust it. Just because he looked fine didn't mean that the stubborn bastard actually was.

Wash swallowed, prepared to try again for something suitably scathing, only to lose it when Maine's eyes narrowed in visible anger. Anger that looked like it was directed at _him._

"Move," Maine snapped, his voice like ice, as he pointed in the direction of the LZ.

It was that tone—like Wash had fucked up egregiously when it had been _Maine_ not answering hails and _ Maine _ doing insanely risky stunts like he had a death wish—that broke him out of his impotent silence. " _What_—"

Maine grabbed him by the upper arm, spun him around, and shoved him forward, completely ignoring his inarticulate snarl of outrage. "_Now_."

Fuming, Wash jerked away from him and stormed ahead. Maine's IFF still wasn't showing up on his display, but the others’ were and it looked like they'd reached their destination safely. Or alive, at any rate. All of the tags were green.

He opened the main channel. "I got Maine," he said shortly. "We're on our way back."

Immediately, it filled with voices.

"What the fuck was that?" York's angry demand was the first that made it through, followed quickly by Carolina's calmer, yet no less irritated, "Status report."

"No injuries to me," Wash replied brusquely, ignoring York. He knew he was going to have to hear about it later. There was no sense in suffering through the diatribe twice. "At least minor injuries to Maine and damage to his armor. Vulture's been disabled."

"We know," South remarked dryly.

"Compound's on fire," Wash continued, ignoring her as well.

"We know that too," Florida piped up, sounding amused.

"ETA?" Carolina prompted.

Wash checked the readout. "A minute. Maybe two. Depends if we hit resistance."

And oh, how he wanted to meet resistance. Shooting a bunch of bastards, maybe getting into an actual hand-to-hand fight or two, would surely blunt the edge of his anger. But it wasn't to be. No one challenged them. No one shot at them. There wasn't even a flicker on the motion trackers. Maine didn't say a single word the entire walk back to the Pelican and the longer he ignored him, the angrier Wash got until he was so furious he could barely think straight.

York started in on them the moment they arrived at the Pelican, but Maine snarled a very succinct _fuck off_ at him and stomped away into the front of the ship. In no mood for a lecture, Wash refused to meet his eyes and took a seat near the door, as far away from everybody else as he could get. He stayed there for the duration of the flight back to the _Mother of Invention, _stewing in anger and frustration and refusing to acknowledge the rest of the passengers. Maine remained up front with Carolina and the other three, stranded in the tense no man's land in the middle of the Pelican, made small talk and failed spectacularly at surreptitiously staring at Wash when they thought he wasn’t paying attention.

With the mission successful, it wasn't necessary for all six of them to tromp up to the ready room. Only the designated team leaders needed to be debriefed by the Director. Had anyone else been required to attend, they would have received an ominous message en-route, but as far as Wash knew, that hadn't happened. Or if it had, _he_ hadn’t been ordered to accompany York and Carolina.

Because he was sitting by the door, he was the first one off the Pelican when it landed and he went immediately to the locker room to divest himself of his armor. He walked quickly, not wanting to chance being cornered by any of the others, and upon entry, was relieved to discover that the whole place was empty. As much as he liked North, he wasn't in the mood to field questions or listen to gentle advice.

Wash was down to his undersuit by the time he heard the door slide open. Yanking a clean set of clothes out of his locker, he stayed facing it, still too pissed off to deal with anybody. Heavy, deliberate footsteps approached, growing louder the closer they got, and stopped a few meters away. The faint click of another locker opening followed. Maine. Of course.

The nape of Wash's neck prickled as tense, angry silence thrummed conspicuously between them. Tempting as it was to spin around and let the reckless son of a bitch have it, he couldn't guarantee their privacy and he didn't want to make a scene. If they hadn't come in already, the others would be there eventually. Florida might not say anything about it to anyone other than Wyoming, but South never let anything go and would probably delight in being a huge bitch about it for the rest of his life. York would want to spread his unsolicited advice around, Carolina would radiate disappointed disapproval like it was her job, and too many of the others would treat an argument between them like sideshow entertainment. It just wasn't worth it.

But fucking hell, Was h was pissed. And the longer he kept his mouth shut, the worse it got until it felt like he was going to explode. The busted helmet and damaged armor had clearly explained why Maine hadn’t responded to hails or registered to his armor’s system as active, and had his anger been only rooted in fear and loss, it would have dissipated by now. But taking the brunt of Maine’s anger had been like pouring fuel onto a dying blaze and it had rekindled into something too hot and wild to properly handle.

Everything exacerbated it. The other Freelancers, who still called him_ rookie,_ who jeered at him and made jokes about his competence. The Director, who’d found an injured soldier and convinced him he was nothing more than a weapon. The Counselor, who’d probably done his best to encourage that line of thinking, murmuring his dehumanizing poison in Maine’s ears in that too-calm voice. And especially Maine, who evidently believed all the bullshit that grated so heavily on Wash’s nerves.

Hoping to get a better grip on his temper, he concentrated on extracting himself from his undersuit, relegating the loud clatter of Maine discarding his armor to an annoying bit of background noise. Once he’d gotten free of the clinging material, he yanked on a pair of loose pants and an old t-shirt, shoved his feet into a pair of worn sneakers, slammed his locker closed, and booked it out of there without a backwards glance. What to do with himself while the anger simmered under his skin, threatening to boil over, was the dilemma of the moment.

Burn some of it off in the gym? Try to outrun it on the track? Go back to his quarters and sleep it off? Wash wasn’t quite tired enough for that, but he knew he’d have less of a chance of running into someone there than he would if he was at large on the ship. Getting into a fight would provide some much needed instant gratification, but he knew that avoiding one would be better for him in the long run.

Changing directions at the first intersection, Wash made his way to his quarters. He was stepping through the doorway, one hand reaching for the panel on the wall to turn on the lights, when something hit him in the middle of the back. He stumbled, the force of the shove propelling him forward into the room. Before he could regain his balance, a vice-like grip latched onto his upper arm and jerked him around. The strength of the maneuver told him who it was—no one else could fling around a full-grown man of Wash’s height and build—but surprise still flashed through him when he met Maine’s eyes.

"What are—"

Maine cut him off with a growl. "What was that?"

"What?"

He wasn't playing stupid, but judging from the scowl that twisted his thin-lipped mouth, Maine didn't believe the question was genuine. With that one hand iron-tight around his arm, he shook him so hard that Wash's teeth clacked together.

"That stunt."

Renewed anger washed away his momentary surprise. Wash took a step into Maine's space to snarl up at him. "It wasn't a _stunt._ I was trying to complete the fucking mission."

"Could've killed you."

"But it didn't."

"You know that when you did it?"

_Oh, hell no. _ Wash bristled. "You know the outcome to everything _you_ do before you do it?"

The sarcasm had no effect. Maine stared at him, as implacable as an avalanche, demanding an answer without saying a word. Wash flexed his bicep, testing the hold he had on him. It was like being encased in concrete. Not even a hint of give.

Knowing they were going to stand there like that until he cooperated, with the fingers of one hand slowly going numb and the others itching to curl into a fist, Wash hissed angrily, "I had it under control."

Maine lifted an eyebrow and looked down his nose at him, his lack of belief in that statement so eloquently presented that words weren't necessary.

The vision of him throwing himself onto the Vulture was vivid in Wash’s mind. "And you did?"

The look he got practically screamed _of course I did_ and _you're a fucking idiot for thinking otherwise._

"Don't give me that bullshit," Wash snapped. "You bleed just like the rest of us. And if you can do crazy shit like attack a fucking Vulture, so can I."

"You aren't a Spartan."

"And you aren't invincible!"

It was bad enough that he shrugged so carelessly. But then he had to add insult to injury with a dismissive, "Doesn't matter."

"Yes it fucking does!"

Maine shook his head.

"Then it doesn't matter if I get killed doing something reckless either."

With a wordless growl, Maine shook him, his fingers biting into Wash's arm so hard that his fingers spasmed involuntarily.

_Yeah, got you now, you bastard. _Ignoring his twitching fingers and the livid fury in Maine's eyes, Wash crowded into his personal space until they were almost touching. He wasn't tall enough to actually snarl in his face, so he tipped his head back and glared fiercely at him. "One or the other, you fucking hypocrite. You can't have it both ways."

The muscle along the side of his jaw tightened as Maine visibly marshaled the remnants of his temper. "I was made for this. You weren't."

"That doesn't fucking—" Wash broke off with an inarticulate sound of frustrated rage.

The hand that hadn't lost sensation was clenching. He was going to punch him. Wash could see it happening so clearly that for a few seconds, he dismissed the sight of his rising fist as nothing more than an anger-fueled vision. By the time he figured out that he wasn't imagining it, it was too late. He was committed to the motion, little more than a passenger in his own body.

Except he didn't hit him. His fingers caught in the collar of Maine's t-shirt, twisting the fabric as if he meant to move all 130 kilos of his bulk with only that tether of thin cotton. But it was Wash that was moving, not Maine, and somewhere between the wild urge to beat the easy willingness to die out of him and actually doing it, he kissed him instead.

He might as well have struck him, as brutally furious as it was. Maine's lips were slack with surprise beneath the hard press of his own, obviously caught off-guard. The temptation to bite them surged through Wash, momentarily drowning out everything else. He wanted to bruise him, make him bleed until he couldn't deny his own mortality. But they were firming even as he thought it, and before he could act, before he could even properly register it, Maine was kissing him back.

Wash's back slammed into the wall, driving the remnants of his breath from his already wilting lungs, as Maine's tongue swept past his lips. He dimly felt a prickling, needle-sharp tingle rushing down his arm and new points of bruising pressure blossoming across his hip and along the side of his jaw, but that awareness quickly disappeared under the immediacy of Maine's mouth claiming his own, of his solid body pressing him almost painfully into equally unyielding metal. The familiar tang of blood splashed across his tongue, but Wash didn't know whose it was and didn't care.

Maine started to draw back, to stop or to get air, and Wash dug his fingers into the back of his neck, refusing to let him go. A rumbling growl vibrated against his chest seconds before Maine bit him, a bright pin-prick of pain that had him raking his fingernails over Maine's skin in retaliation. One caught the scar tissue around the neural interface at the base of his skull, provoking a hiss that didn't sound entirely pained.

Then Maine's thigh was between his legs, hard muscle against Wash's cock, and the jolt of pleasure left him shuddering, gasping for breath and scrabbling against Maine's shoulders. Another one of those low growls passed between them, satisfaction and possessiveness, before Maine kissed him again.

Wash tried to rock his hips, desperate for friction, but he was pinned too tightly to eke out even a hint of motion. He started to tip his head sideways, meaning to break the kiss to tell him off, and Maine tightened his grip on his jaw, holding him in place and plundering his mouth, effectively muffling his complaints into incomprehension. Frustrated, so aroused now that it nearly hurt, Wash clawed at his back, a keening whine building embarrassingly in his throat.

It was only when he heard Maine's soft, gravelly chuckle that he realized that the bastard was toying with him.

Jerking his head, Wash broke his hold and took a deep, gasping breath. "You b—"

The muscle in Maine's thigh flexed, pulsing along the length of his cock, and his curse dissolved into a groan.

"Like that?"

He opened his eyes—when had he shut them?—and met Maine's smug smile. "M'still mad at you." And he was. He very much was. But his gazed had slipped to Maine's swollen mouth and Wash knew he could feel his muscles clenching and releasing as he tried mindlessly, futilely, to rut against his leg.

"Yeah." Maine's easy agreement was immediately overshadowed by the obliging rock of his leg, rubbing purposely against Wash's cock.

The back of his head hit the wall with a dull _thunk_ , unspoken words dissolving into an unintelligible moan. He shut his eyes on purpose this time, wanting to lose himself in the sensation, only to open them as Maine's leg abruptly vanished. "What are you — _Fuck_."

Maine's hand was there, cupping him through his pants, squeezing just this side of enough. His other hand was still gripping Wash's hip, pinning him to the wall. Pinning him to the wall and holding him up off the ground like he weighed nothing. _One-fucking-handed_.

A wave of lust hit him so hard he almost came. Maine must have saw something in his face, because he stopped moving, his hand there but infuriatingly motionless.

"Need a minute?"

_You..._ Even Wash's thoughts were an incoherent, useless jumble. He took a deep breath, tried to focus on the bite of Maine's fingers into his hip and the weight of his palm on his groin and ignore the air beneath his feet and the undeniable presence of Maine's cock, hard as iron, against his thigh. When that failed to shove him back from the precipice of embarrassing the hell out of himself, he reached for the anger. It wasn't nearly as strong as it needed to be.

"We doing this or what?" he gritted out.

Maine was laughing at him. Not out loud, but Wash could see the humor in his eyes and thought he glimpsed the hint of a smile before he said casually, "In a hurry?"

"Depends." There was no point lying about it. Maine already knew. "You want this to be over already?"

Pressed together the way they were, Wash felt his low, knowing laughter as easily as he heard it. He shot him an unamused glare that turned into one of bewildered betrayal when he pulled his hand away. Wash opened his mouth to object, then snapped it shut so hard his teeth clicked together as warm, callused fingers delved under his waistband and closed skin-to-skin around his cock.

Maine arched an eyebrow at him, cocky confidence and challenge all at once, and set to jerking him off without further comment. His fist was tight, his palm a little rough, and the speed he set was relentless. A steady push down to the base, then a long pull up until the head of Wash's cock nearly slipped free, then down again. Over and over, riding the precarious edge between too slow and not slow enough.

In less than a minute, Wash was panting with urgent need, hips practically twitching with the desire to thrust forward and completely unable to do it. He made a fumbling attempt to return the favor, but there wasn’t room to get his hand where it needed to go.

“Lemme,” he tried, pushing at Maine’s hip, hoping he’d get the message. Whole coherent sentences were well beyond him.

Instead of cooperating, Maine elbowed his hand away so smoothly that it didn’t interrupt the pace of his strokes. Thwarted, Wash growled his displeasure, though seconds later, that too was swept away, the implacable rhythm of Maine’s fist working an orgasm out of him so unexpectedly intense that it blanked his mind of everything except the pleasure. When he came back to himself, he was sagging bonelessly against the wall, upright only because Maine hadn’t released him.

His hand was still moving over Wash’s cock, slowly sliding up and down the shaft, smearing come over his skin as the last traces of enjoyable sensation turned sharp and uncomfortable. Wash flinched as it became too much, hissing softly under his breath, and the motion stopped. Maine gently let go, but he didn’t move away. And his cock was still hard against his hip.

Wash met his eyes, dark with what he assumed was desire, and gave him a lazy, satiated smile. “Any requests?”

One of Maine’s eyebrows rose.

He did his best to pointedly wriggle his hip. “How do you want me to take care of this?”

“Don’t need to.”

Wash stared at him, failing to comprehend the message those three words were trying to convey. “You’re as hard as a rock. Pretty sure your dick disagrees.”

Maine rolled his eyes. “Give it a minute.”

“What’s going to happen then?”

“Won’t be hard anymore.”

He didn’t know what to make of that and Maine’s bland expression wasn’t helping. Had he been rutting against him, it would’ve sounded like he meant to take care of it himself, but Maine wasn't moving and his hands were both firmly settled on Wash. That left only the obvious conclusion, which quickly soured what remained of his post-orgasmic bliss.

There wasn't anywhere to go, but Wash recoiled all the same, yanking his hands away. "Aren't you—I thought—" _—_ _you wanted me._ But it was worse than that. "If I for—"

Maine silenced him with a slightly damp forefinger across his lips. "Don't be stupid."

In other, more certain circumstances, Wash would have sucked that finger into his mouth and licked the last traces of his come from Maine's skin. Now, it was an unsettling reminder that made shame twist his stomach into knots. _My fault. I _ _misunderstood what he meant last night. I_ _ knew he wasn't interested, knew they fucked with his head, and I pushed anyway. _Not that he believed Maine incapable of saying no. But if he didn't consider himself a person, if he thought he was just something to be used, how was what Wash had done any different from the way the UNSC and the Director treated him?

"Wash." With the knuckle of his middle finger, Maine pressed his chin up until he met his eyes. "You're being stupid."

He hadn't removed his finger. Wash ignored it, opening his mouth to refute that claim, to apologize, to say _something_ instead of cringing away from him like a coward, and Maine pushed against his lips, warning him to be silent.

"Augmentation process changed us. Made us stronger, faster, more durable, less prone to distraction. Perfect soldiers." He stopped there, intently studying Wash’s eyes like he was waiting for something. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to get it. After a moment’s silence, Wash gave a slight head shake. Maine exhaled, not quite heavily enough for a sigh. “Sex is a distraction.”

Even with it spelled out, it took Wash an embarrassingly long time to comprehend what he was hearing, but when his lips parted this time, Maine withdrew his finger to let him speak. “But that’s_—_ ” Although his erection had begun to fade while he spoke, he’d still gotten hard. Wash had felt the proof of that. _What the fuck are you saying? _“I don’t understand.”

“Reduced libido.” He gave one of those careless shrugs. “And what’s left, they taught us how to ignore.”

_What?_ The more he learned about Spartans, the more apparent it was becoming that the fantasy the UNSC had sold to humanity was a far cry from the reality. They weren’t unbeatable superheroes come to save the human race in its darkest hour. They were victims of experimentation and mutilation beyond anything Wash had imagined. And the more clearly he realized this, the more ashamed he became that he’d ever believed otherwise. This was real life, carved into Maine’s skin so deeply that his more resilient body still bore the scars. Not neatly sanitized science-fiction, administered with a dose of painless, miraculous serum.

And perhaps the worst part of it was that Maine didn’t seem to care about what had been done to him.

At a complete loss for what to say, Wash shook his head helplessly. “You gotta help me out here. What was this?”

The upward cant of Maine's mouth suggested that internally, he was laughing at him. "That not obvious?"

"No." It came out sharper than he meant it. "It's not. I mean, it oughta be pretty fucking obvious what I want. But what do _you_ want?"

Maine looked at him like he'd just said the stupidest thing he'd ever heard. "You."

"I meant—"

"Didn't know what you wanted. Now I do."

"You didn't know what I wanted," Wash repeated hollowly, as a veritable slideshow of memories flickered through his mind, reminding him of all the times Maine had caught him checking him out over the last few months. "Really."

He snorted softly, amused. "Been a Spartan since I was a kid. Never had time for any of this."

Two conflicting questions vied for control of Wash's mouth, leaving him momentarily speechless. _Exactly how_ _ young were you? Are you saying you've never had sex before? _What came out, when he finally got his throat working properly, wasn't either of them. "You really want me to ignore it?"

Maine cocked his head, considering him. "That what you want?"

Wash ground his teeth together so hard that his jaw hurt. "How many times do I have to tell you that your opinion matters before you believe it?" Maine's lips parted like he was actually going to respond to that with words. For once, Wash didn't let him. And given what he'd learned about Maine's past, he wasn't going to dance around it either. "I probably would've sucked you off in the locker room the day I met you if you'd asked. So. Yeah. Take it for granted that where you're concerned, the answer's always gonna be yes."

Whether it was because he'd gotten to know him well enough to recognize the subtleties of his expressions or he was just eyeing him that closely, Wash saw the brief flicker of uncertainty in Maine's eyes. _Jesus Christ, he really hasn't done this before. _He licked his lips, throat suddenly extraordinarily dry, and watched Maine track the movement of his tongue.

"Need to hear you say it, buddy," he said softly.

And if he didn't, Wash would drop it. He'd be confused as hell and unsure about where exactly this left them and what they were going to do about it, if anything, but he wasn't going to pressure Maine into anything he didn't want or wasn't ready to do.

After a moment that felt heavier than it probably was, Maine dipped his chin. "Yeah."

Wash touched his arm. "Gonna need some room to work here."

With a hint of regret, he felt his feet settle onto the floor. A dull, throbbing sensation flooded his hip as Maine released that tight grip he'd had on him and the blood rushed back in. _Definitely gonna be bruised later. _Following that thought was a dim flicker of arousal that Wash shoved away. It was too soon, literally and probably figuratively, to do anything about it.

Pressing his palm to Maine's chest, Wash maneuvered him around until they'd traded places. "I've had a thing for you since day one." Spreading his fingers wide, he looked up and met Maine's eyes. "Not saying any of this is necessary." His slid his hand down, slowly running it over the hard, sculpted muscles. "But if it's on the table, I want to take advantage."

The corner of Maine's mouth twitched upward. "You gonna take advantage of me, Wash?"

That low, teasing growl did something shivery to Wash's insides. "You gonna let me?"

Exhaling hard enough to be audible, Maine took hold of his chin and ducked down, catching his mouth in a bruisingly hungry kiss. Wash's hand stilled somewhere at his abdomen, unable to do anything except get swept up in it. At some point his other hand found Maine's waist, but it was only to steady himself as his knees turned to mush and he started feeling lightheaded.

A quiet chuckle rumbled between them as Maine eased back just a little. His lips moved lightly against Wash's as he asked, still teasing, "Sure I'm not taking advantage of you?"

Snorting, Wash resumed the downward sweep of his hand until the heel of it brushed the edge of Maine's cock. It wasn't as hard as it had been earlier, but it seemed well on its way. "Don't make promises you aren't going to keep."

Maine's eyes were dark, more pupil than iris, and there was nothing disinterested in the fierce intensity of his gaze. "Who said I won't keep them?"

Wash's fingers curled, an involuntary reaction to the mental images that conjured. Maine inhaled sharply, the only outward reaction to his touch that he'd had, and whatever uncertainties he had about doing this vanished. "So you like this, then?" he asked, smirking up at him as he rubbed his thumb along the length of his cock. "Feels good? You can tell me."

He gripped Wash's shoulder, not quite applying pressure but not exactly keeping the touch light and weightless either. "You wanna talk instead?"

_Fuck no_. That mild hint of impatience was enough to bring the teasing to an end. Wash knelt in front of him, Maine's hand following him down. They probably could have picked a more comfortable place to do this, but as he tugged the loose pants and boxer briefs off Maine's hips and down his thighs, Wash didn't spare his knees any thought.

No longer restrained by layers of fabric and now fully erect, Maine's cock jutted up from a closely cropped patch of black hair. Long and thick, it was larger than Wash's, but not dauntingly so, and after having spent so long with only his hand for company, it wouldn't have mattered if it had been. His mouth was nearly watering in anticipation and it was right there, practically nudging his lips.

Without pausing to think about it, Wash leaned forward and took the head of it into his mouth. Maine's sharp inhale brought his eyes back up to his face. There was a tightness to his expression, echoed in the sudden vice-like grip of his hand, that suggested he was holding himself back. _That's not gonna work for me. _Wash dipped the tip of his tongue into the slit, licking until he could taste a faint bitterness and Maine's breathing came just a little too fast.

He withdrew his tongue, sliding it over the silky smooth head and down underneath the crown, and canted his head forward a little, taking a few more centimeters in before sucking. Maine's lips thinned, his blunt fingernails biting painfully into Wash's skin. It took some persuasiveness, but Wash convinced himself to pull off for a second.

“You can move if you want.” He slid a loose fist absently up and down the shaft, touching him, giving him pleasure without trying to hustle anything along. “Make noise. Pull my hair. Move me around. I don’t care. Not going to judge you any more than you were judging me a minute ago. Just, uh, don’t fuck my mouth _too_ hard. Not this time. It’s been a while since I did this and I need to get used to it again.”

“How long?” There was a rough, possessive note to Maine’s tone that suggested that he wasn’t asking out of simple curiosity.

Wash grinned up at him. “_Years_ ago.” He gave the head of his cock a long, wet kiss. “You wanna help me practice?” Maine dug his fingers harder into his shoulder. “Then keep me all to yourself after I know what I’m doing again?”

Playing to that possessiveness worked like a dream. Maine caught hold of his hair, then released his shoulder, and tugged him closer to his cock. Arousal flashed through Wash again, curled in his stomach and made his spent cock twitch. “Yeah. Sounds like a plan to me, too.”

A part of him wanted to take his time. If this was Maine’s first blowjob, Wash wanted it to be good enough to make him come back for more. But he could see the hints of impatience in Maine’s eyes, felt it in the pull along his scalp. Rewarding Maine for acknowledging and acting on his feelings seemed more important in that moment than perfect performance.

Wash took his cock into his mouth again, hollowed out his cheeks, and sucked. He couldn’t take him the whole way in, but he did his best, sinking down as far as he could go before it got uncomfortable and pulling back up. Over and over, licking at the underside of his cock. Fondling his balls. Maine’s hold on his hair got tighter. The fingers of his free hand brushed over Wash’s cheek, like he was trying to feel himself through his skin. When Wash slid his forefinger under his balls and pressed against his taint, Maine’s hips bucked and pushed his cock further into his mouth, almost choking him.

He did it again. And again. Firmly stroked his finger over it until Maine actually_ was_ fucking his mouth. Wash let him, tried to keep his muscles as loose as possible, and powered through the discomfort until Maine snarled something incomprehensible and came.

Hot come flooded Wash’s mouth, spattered the roof of his mouth and the back of his throat, as Maine’s cock pulsed on his tongue. His hips moved in short, jerky motions, through it, fucking through the orgasm as Wash gentled the press of his finger and slowly drew it away. He stayed there on his knees, listening to Maine’s harsh breathing as he came to a stop, then licked and lightly sucked at his cock until the stimulation got to be too much for him and pulled out of his mouth.

Wiping the saliva off his chin, Wash looked up and watched him, waiting. Maine’s fingers slowly loosened, second by painstaking second, until they lay flat against his head. And then, just as he was about to move, they started running gently over it, smoothing out his sweaty, rumpled hair. Wash wasn’t entirely sure Maine knew he was doing it, there was something a little too distant about his slack, fucked-out expression. But it felt good, so Wash let him do it until the softness faded out his face and the look in his eyes sharpened.

“Good?” he asked, his grinning as his voice came out hoarse and Maine’s eyes dilated._ Guess so._

“Yeah.”

It probably wasn’t polite to tease him, but Wash couldn’t help himself. “Yeah, it’ll do? Or yeah, I ought to invest in some knee pads?”

Maine ruffled up his hair. “Might want to hurry up.”

Wash laughed, delighted. “That good, huh? I’ll—”

Maine’s cock had gone soft after his orgasm, but now it was getting hard again. Not quickly. Not immediately. But as Wash watched, it thickened a little more. He looked up and met Maine’s smug smirk.

“Are you shitting me with this?”

He shrugged. “Spartan metabolism.”

Wash ran a disbelieving fingertip along the shaft, feeling it growing firmer. _Holy shit._ The things he could do with this. He looked back to Maine’s eyes and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Ditch the clothes and get on the bed. My knees are _way_ too old for this.”

* * *

**Present Day**

* * *

Emily reached across the table as she sat down opposite Oliver. "Give me your credit chip."

He eyed her suspiciously, making no move to reach for it. "Why?"

She shrugged. "I thought you'd want to collect on our wager. If not..."

"Whoa!" He held up his hands. "Wait. Hold on." Casting a quick glance around the relatively empty cafeteria, he leaned forward and lowered his voice. "What'd you find out?"

Because _that_ didn't look suspicious at all. She rolled her eyes and didn't lean in to meet him. But she did adjust her voice to a low murmur so she wouldn't inadvertently be overheard. "The Director and the patient. There was — _is_—something there. The Director loves him."

"And you found this out how?"

"I asked him."

"You..." He stared at her, just this side of gaping.

Heat rose to her cheeks. She ignored it. "I didn't mean to. It just slipped out." Oliver's eyebrows lifted dramatically. "We were talking about the patient's recent brain scans. And for a second, I don't know, he just looked so lost and hopeless."

Oliver shook his head. "So you just asked him? Just, right there, just asked if this guy was his boyfriend or what?"

Emily kicked him under the table, jamming the toe of her shoe into his shin until he winced. "I'm not as tactless as _you._" Technically.

It did nothing to quell his smartass comments. "Did he fire you?"

She had half a mind to try another, significantly harder, kick. "Oh shut up." Oliver smirked at her, waiting for more information. "He didn't really tell me much of anything. Just that he kept searching after whatever it was that happened to them because he'd heard some rumors or something that led him to believe he wasn't actually dead."

"And?"

"And what?"

"What else did he say?"

"What did _I_ just say?" He looked at her blankly, not taking the hint. Emily sighed. "Nothing else. He seemed really sad and I was too embarrassed that I'd said anything to ask questions. Not to mention, it wasn't any of my business in the first place."

Oliver chewed on the inside of his lip, humming absently to himself, as he digested that. "Sure he wasn't trying to impress you with his sensitivity?"

_What?_ "What?"

"You know." Waving his hand airily, Oliver gave her a soulfully mournful look. "Tragic romance. A broken heart only a sexy doctor can mend."

The suggestion was so preposterous that for a few seconds, it didn't quite sink in. Then, when it had, she glared at him, the memory of the lost look in the Director's eyes making her take offense on his behalf. "He wasn't hitting on me! _Jesus._ What's wrong with you?"

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, c'mon. He's rich. He looks like he might've been attractive before someone dunked him in liquid nitrogen and smashed his face or put him through a mirror or whatever it was."

"You're an ass."

"I'm a man. I know how we operate."

Emily scowled at him. "And _I_ know that he wasn't trying to seduce me. You weren't there. He didn't mean for me to see how badly affected he was." She jerked her chin, meaning to encompass the ship and everything that was happening on it in the gesture. "The way it sounded, he did all of this for our John Doe. I can't imagine that kind of devotion. But I know it isn't looking for a piece of ass on the side." And then, because sometimes points really needed to get driven home for Oliver to knock it the fuck off, she added severely, "Especially a woman's."

He brushed that off with a careless shrug. "You don't know. Might like both."

"I highly doubt that."

Sniffing, Oliver waggled his eyebrows suggestively. "Then maybe _I_ ought to try to get some information out of him."

She leveled the flattest, most unimpressed stare on him that she could muster. "You do that."

And of course, he took it as a challenge. "You know, I think I will. Double or nothing?"

On the one hand, the team needed Oliver's expertise. And given how meticulous he was about everything else, the Director undoubtedly realized that that was the case and he couldn't fire him for being an inappropriate idiot. But on the other, it would serve him right if he embarrassed himself in front of their employer.

With that in mind, Emily gave him a crooked, thoughtful half-smile. "If you can flirt your way into getting him to tell you what you want to know, I'll _triple_ my end of the wager."

Oliver grinned. "You're on."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For contact links and info about current projects, please visit my [carrd](https://griffonfarm.carrd.co)!

**Author's Note:**

> For contact links and info about current projects, please visit my [carrd](https://griffonfarm.carrd.co)!


End file.
